How to analyse a competitor's website

Step 1: pick the right competitors, which are rarely the ones you name

Ask an owner who their competitors are and you get the firms they meet at trade events. Ask Google and you get a different list. The second list is the one costing you customers, because those are the businesses a buyer sees when they go looking.

• Search the three or four terms a customer would actually type, including the town. Write down who appears in the top five and who appears in the map results, which are often different companies.
• Pick three to five: one who beats you in search, one who beats you on reviews, and one at roughly your level.
• Ignore the national aggregators and directories. You are not going to out-rank Checkatrade, and trying is a waste of a year.

Step 2: record the same eight things for each

Consistency is what makes this useful. The same eight fields for every competitor, in one table, so you can see the pattern rather than a pile of impressions.

• Pages they have that you do not. Read their sitemap at /sitemap.xml. This single step finds more gaps than everything else combined.
• Whether prices are published, and how they frame them.
• Their review count and score on Google, not just the score. Count is what moves the map results.
• What they promise. Response times, guarantees, free surveys, callout fees.
• How a customer contacts them. Form, phone, chat, booking system, WhatsApp.
• Whether they advertise. A Google Ads or Meta pixel in their code, or an entry in the Meta Ad Library.
• How current the site is. Sitemap dates and the last blog post.
• What is missing. No schema, no location pages, no reviews on the site, no photos of real work. Gaps are opportunities.

Step 3: interpret it, which is where most people stop too early

Pages are a strategy, not a list

If every rival has a page for a service and you have it buried in a bullet on your homepage, you are not competing for that term at all. Equally, if a rival has forty near-identical town pages, that is not something to copy: it is the pattern search engines increasingly filter, and it often means their rankings are more fragile than they look.

Reviews beat almost everything locally

In map results, review count is one of the strongest signals there is. A business with 61 reviews at 4.5 will usually outrank one with 8 reviews at 5.0, because nobody reads 61 reviews but everybody sees the number. If that is the gap, no amount of website work closes it. Asking customers does.

Silence is information

A competitor with no analytics, no schema and a blog that stopped two years ago is not investing. That is the one to target, because you can move past them with a modest amount of consistent work. Spend your effort where the incumbent is asleep, not where they are strongest.

Step 4: turn it into three actions, not a report

A competitor analysis that produces twenty ideas produces nothing. Take three, and prefer the ones you can finish this month.

• The clearest gap. One page everyone else has and you do not, written properly rather than thinly.
• The cheapest advantage. Usually reviews, opening hours, or answering the phone faster than they do.
• The one thing you can say that they cannot. Real photos, a named person, a guarantee, a specialism. This is the part that cannot be copied back.

Step 5: watch for changes, because that is where the value is

A one-off analysis ages immediately. The genuinely useful signal is the change: a new service page, a price that moves, a tracking pixel appearing for the first time, a burst of new content. Each of those is a decision somebody made, and you see it weeks or months before you see its results in the market.

You can do this by hand with a calendar reminder and twenty minutes a quarter, and doing it that way is far better than not doing it. Competitor Watch exists because we got tired of the reminder being the thing that failed, so it takes the snapshot, keeps looking, and tells you what moved.