SEO competitor analysis for a small business: a simple method

You already know who you compete with. The two or three firms down the road, the ones you lose a quote to now and then. Google may not see them as your competitors at all.

So that's where SEO competitor analysis starts. Not with the businesses you compete with in person, but with the sites that turn up when a customer types a search. Those can be very different lists. And the second one is the one that decides who gets found.

This guide gives you a simple method you can run in an afternoon with a browser and a spreadsheet. No tools needed, no jargon. You'll know who to watch, what to look at, and what to do with it.

Write down ten phrases a customer would genuinely type when looking for what you sell. Not your trade terms. Theirs. If you fit kitchens, that might be "kitchen fitter near me" or "how much does a new kitchen cost". Think about the questions, too, because people search in questions.

Now search each one. Note every site that appears on the first page. Then look for repeats.

Some names will show up again and again. Those are your search competitors. A directory might be one. A local rival you'd never thought about might be another. A tradesperson two towns over could be there too. Some may well be bigger than you; we come to that below.

Keep the list short. Five or six sites is plenty. More than that and you'll never finish.

Pick one competitor and spend twenty minutes on their site. You're looking at five things.

The pages they have. Click through the main menu and note every service page, location page and guide. You're asking one question: what topics do they cover that you don't?

How each service page is built. Open a service page and read it as a customer would. Is there a clear heading? Does it say what's included, who it's for and roughly how the work goes? Are there photos, prices or a process? Notice the structure, not the wording.

What questions they answer. Look for FAQ sections, blog posts and "how to" pages. Every question they answer is a search someone might make. If they answer ten and you answer none, that's a gap.

How fresh the content is. Check dates on posts and look for pages that mention a year long past. Stale content tells you a competitor has stopped trying. That's an opening.

How they present reviews and contact details. Where do reviews sit? On the homepage, on each service page, or buried? Is the phone number easy to find? Is there a simple form? These small things decide whether a visitor picks up the phone or leaves.

Do this for each site on your list. Resist the urge to rush.

Here's the honest part. You can't see a competitor's real traffic. You can't see every term they rank for either.

Tools exist that give estimates of both. That's the word: estimates. Treat them as rough guides, and be warier still for small sites. Use them for a rough sense of direction if you like, but don't treat a number as fact.

And that's fine. You don't need their traffic to learn from them. What a competitor has published is visible, and that's the part you can act on.

Set up a simple table. One row per page you notice. Five columns:

Those three rows are examples of the layout, nothing more. Your own rows will come from your own research.

The last column matters most. It forces you to write something you'd do, not just something you noticed. "They have a page on this" isn't a plan. "We'd add our own call-out process and the areas we cover" is.

Fill the table as you go. Twenty or thirty rows across all your competitors is a good result.

Now sort. Look down the "do we have it?" column and group the rows into two piles.

1. Pages to write. Topics a customer searches for that you don't cover at all.
2. Pages to fix. Pages you already have that are thinner, older or harder to use than the competition.

Then cut it down. Pick three to five items. Not twenty. Choose the ones closest to how you actually make money, and where you know the subject best.

This is where the Google guidance helps. Google's starter guide says content should be unique, and that you shouldn't copy others' content in part or entirely. It says to create it based on what you know, and not to rehash what others have already published. Its helpful content guidance asks whether your page offers substantial value compared with other pages in search results, and whether it gives original information, reporting, research or analysis.

So your worksheet isn't a list of things to copy. It's a list of things to answer better, using what you know that they don't. Your own jobs and your own process, down to the local detail. That's the bit nobody else can write.

Copying. It's tempting. A competitor's page looks good and you want one like it. Don't. Beyond the Google guidance above, it gives a visitor no reason to pick you over them.

Chasing big national sites. If a national brand or a huge directory dominates a search, you probably won't displace it by matching its page. That is our judgement, not a rule. Better to look for the narrower searches, the local ones and the specific questions, where a small business can genuinely be useful.

Judging by one search from your own browser. This one catches people out. If you search from your own logged-in browser, what you see may differ from what a customer sees. Results can change with location and personalisation. In our judgement, a single search tells you very little. Search a few times, from a private window if you can, and look for patterns rather than one result.

Expecting fast answers. Changes can take anywhere from hours to several months to show. So make your fixes, then wait a few weeks before you assess anything. Checking daily will only wind you up.

One more point, and it's a quiet one. Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it has already crawled. A new page nobody links to can sit unseen. So link to your new pages from your own menu and related pages, so they're easy to find.

• List ten phrases a customer would actually type.
• Search each and note the repeat sites.
• Review five or six competitors, not fifty.
• Record pages, structure, questions, freshness, reviews and contact details.
• Fill the worksheet, including the "what would we add" column.
• Choose three to five pages to write or fix.
• Wait a few weeks before judging the result.

If you'd rather not build the worksheet by hand, the free Seracu snapshot gives you a quick look at which topics your site is missing compared with your competitors. It's a handy starting point before you decide what to write first.