What is a local competitor analysis?
A local competitor analysis compares your business with the businesses customers actually see when they search for what you sell in your area. The goal is practical: understand why a competitor gets more calls, and decide the few changes that will close the gap.
It differs from a general market analysis in two ways. The competitor set is defined by local search results, and the measures are the ones that decide who gets chosen on Google: reviews, map visibility, the Google Business Profile, the website and the offer.
Step 1: Find your real competitors
List 5–10 money searches for your trade, such as “roof repair near me”, “roof replacement [city]” and “storm damage roof”. Run each one and record every business in the map pack and the top organic results.
Check from several points across your service area, not just your office. Local results change with the searcher's location, so a business that dominates one suburb may be invisible in the next. A grid of points (for example 7×7) gives the full picture.
Clean the list: merge duplicates, remove closed businesses and the wrong business types, and keep lead sites such as Angi or HomeAdvisor in a separate list. Then rank the rest by how often they appear, how fast they gain reviews, distance and service overlap. Keep the top 5–10 as your direct competitors.
Step 2: Compare the factors that win calls
Use the same checklist for every business so the comparison is fair. Group the checks into six areas:
- Reputation: star rating, review count, new reviews per month, owner reply rate and speed, and review themes.
- Search visibility: map-pack rank per keyword, coverage across your area, share of search and organic rank.
- Google Business Profile: categories, photos and their age, posts, hours, services and booking link.
- Website: mobile speed, phone number and quote form above the fold, trust signals (licence, insurance, warranty) and city/service pages.
- Ads and offers: Google and Facebook ads, Local Services Ads badge, free inspections, financing, warranty length.
- Social and brand: active social profiles, posting rate, years in business, certifications.
MarketMirror publishes its full list of 68 competitor checks, with what each one measures and where the data comes from.
Step 3: Score against your local market
Raw numbers mislead. A 4.6-star rating can lead one market and trail another. Rank each measure among the businesses in your market (a percentile from 0 to 100), then combine the areas with weights that fit your trade. For roofers, reputation and visibility typically matter most.
Record the source and date of every number. Data such as rankings and reviews changes weekly, and an undated comparison quickly becomes misleading.
Step 4: Read competitors' reviews for openings
Group competitors' reviews into themes and count them. Complaints that repeat across several competitors (slow callbacks, messy cleanup, surprise pricing) are opportunities to promise and deliver the opposite. Praise themes show what customers in your market value most.
Step 5: Turn gaps into a prioritized action plan
List every gap, then score each fix by impact and effort. Typical high-impact, low-effort fixes for local businesses are replying to every review, asking every finished job for a review, completing the Google Business Profile, and putting the phone number and quote form at the top of the mobile site.
Commit to the top five fixes rather than a long to-do list, and estimate what each one gets you (for example “about 40 more reviews puts us in the top 3 by review count”).
Step 6: Re-check every month
Local markets move: competitors gain reviews, start advertising and add city pages. Save a snapshot each month and compare against it so you can see whether your fixes worked and react to competitors' moves early.
Local competitor analysis checklist
- 5–10 money searches defined for your trade and city
- Results checked from multiple points across your service area
- Top 5–10 direct competitors identified; lead sites listed separately
- Same checklist applied to every business
- Every measure scored against the local market, with source and date
- Competitor review themes grouped and counted
- Fixes ranked by impact and effort; top five assigned
- Monthly snapshot scheduled
Frequently asked questions
How many competitors should a local business analyze?
Five to ten direct competitors is enough for most local businesses. Choose them from the businesses that appear for your money searches across your service area, and track lead sites such as Angi separately.
How often should I do a competitor analysis?
Do a full analysis once, then re-check monthly. Reviews, rankings and ads change quickly in local markets, so a one-off analysis goes out of date within weeks.
What matters most for local businesses on Google?
Reviews (rating, volume and how fast new ones arrive), map-pack visibility for your money searches, and a complete, active Google Business Profile usually matter most, followed by a mobile website that makes it easy to call.
Can I do a local competitor analysis for free?
Yes, manually: search your keywords from different locations, record the results in a spreadsheet and compare profiles and websites by hand. It takes several hours per market. Tools such as MarketMirror automate the searches, checks and scoring.
Skip the spreadsheet. Run the whole analysis in about two minutes.
MarketMirror runs these steps automatically: it finds your competitors, checks every one, scores them against your market and writes the action plan.