The most direct path to a higher Google Maps position is not following generic SEO advice, but understanding why your specific competitors in your specific market rank above you. A Local SEO competitor analysis is not a one-time activity — it is a cyclical process you repeat every two to three months to track how competition evolves.
Step 1: Identify your real Google Maps competitors
Your real Local SEO competitors are not the businesses you know from the industry — they are the businesses that appear in the Local Pack when your ideal client searches. Perform a geo-grid measurement for your three most important search terms and note which businesses consistently appear in the top-3 across the grid points in your service area. These are your real competitors.
You will likely be surprised. In our experience, fewer than 40% of businesses that owners name as their “biggest competitors” are also their actual Local Pack competitors. The real competitor is often a business you don’t know, with no physical store on your street, but that is better positioned digitally.
Step 2: GBP audit of competitors
Analyze each top competitor’s GBP: number and recency of reviews, profile completeness, post frequency and types, photo volume and quality, and the specific categories and keywords used in their description. For each element, note whether your profile is better, equivalent, or worse.
Step 3: Website analysis and the gap analysis
Analyze competitors’ websites: Do they have separate pages per service and/or location? What structured data are they implementing (check with Google’s Rich Results Test)? In our experience, more than 70% of Dutch SMB websites have no or incomplete structured data — this is often the most direct opportunity to outrank a competitor.
Use the free version of Moz to analyze which websites link to your competitors. This gives you a priority list of citations you should also build. After completing steps 2 and 3, calculate the gap per signal area between your score and the average score of your top-3 competitors. The areas with the largest gap and highest algorithm weight are your priorities.
In most analyses we perform, the three largest gaps are: number and quality of reviews, presence of local landing pages, and structured data implementation. Addressing these three areas delivers the fastest and largest Local Pack improvements in most cases.
The complete competitor analysis template we use at LocalSEOLab.nl, including scoring cards and signal area weighting, is available for LocalSEOLab.nl members.
