Any business will experience competition at some point. This is not something to dread, competition is a great thing in business. By examining another business’ strategies your business will be motivated to do better and find insights on what is working for your business. We can learn a lot from competitors successes and weaknesses and grow from them.

So, what is the most efficient way to obtain this information? Spending time each day analyzing the competition based off of their rankings isn’t realistic for most businesses and agencies. There are more important things, such as running your own business, to worry about.

There is an array powerful competitor analysis tools at your service that can help with this issue. We will cover helpful tips and explain how advantageous these tools are. This post will be your guide to a successful local optimization strategy.

Google Maps Information Can Improve Business Website Ranking.

To begin, check to see which competitors are ranking on not only search engines, but Google Maps as well. Analyzing Google Maps’ top spots is one of the first critical elements of competitor analysis.

Luckily, there are several tools available that check your website’s ranking and show you its position, in real time, for your targeted locations. These tools simplify this otherwise time consuming task.

Three tools that will make a huge difference for your local SEO strategy:

BrightLocal Google My Business Audit

This useful tool can be used to examine important local ranking signals a packaged, single report. This allows you to quickly prioritize tasks that will boost your local search engine ranking.

GeoRanker’s Local Rank Checker

GeoRanker automatically displays all of your competitor’s position changes and provides you with a report on your competition’s growth or lack thereof.

Whitespark Local Rank Tracker

Whitespark, goes beyond basic rank tracking through the use of geo-locating your searches using zip codes. You can even track multiple locations at once to understand how you rank throughout different areas of your city.

Now that you know the tools, let’s go over how to analyze good map rankings using BrightLocal.

Analyzing Google Maps Rankings with BrightLocal

Just by searching a competitor’s business name on Google Maps, you may see that there is a business that appears to rank above you.

This is where the BightLocal tool comes in. The tool will crawl the web to find where the site actually ranks in Local SERPs.

After three simple steps, you will be an analyzing fiend. You just have to navigate to Rankings (1), head over to the Competitor section (2), and click on Google Maps (3).

With this information, we’re able to see that other businesses may rank above the seemingly high ranking business you had seen.

If you are familiar with search engine optimization, you will find that boosting rankings on Google Maps is very similar to ranking websites on Google. Similarly, the most important part of this process is getting backlinks and Local Citations. This includes mentions on other websites for example.

The good news is, there are even more helpful tools for this! These tools monitor competitor citations.

Monitoring Your Competitors’ Local Citations

Although citations make you visible to potential customers or clients, they can impact local search engine rankings both positively (if the citations are accurate) and negatively (if they’re not).

Luckily, there are tools that can gauge where your citations are, help you spot new opportunities, and see how your competitors are doing.

BrightLocal’s Citation Tracker

BrightLocal’s Citation Tracker helps you can find incorrect NAP issues as well as duplicate citations. By identifying these, you can improve your local optimization efforts. Citation Tracker exposes your competitors’ local citations which you can use to boost your ranking.

Moz’s Local Citations Tracker

The Local Citations Tracker from Moz allows local business owners to track and manage their citations. Just enter your business data, and it is automatically pushed out to a set number of platforms with no further effort.

Monitoring and Accruing Your Competitors’ BackLinks

It doesn’t matter if you are in an ultra-competitive industry or if you are working in a niche market, keeping your competitors within sight and monitoring their backlinks is extremely important for your own business. These tools help you do just that:

Cognitive SEO

Cognitive SEO allows you to put your competitors’ homepages in an Instant Backlink Explorer Tool. You can then download the report of their latest links.

SEMRush Backlink Management Tool

Through SEMRush, you can compare your backlink profile with your competitors and spot hidden backlink opportunities. With the Backlink Management Tool, you can compare your backlink profile against up to the maximum of six competitors. This allows you to discover strengths and weaknesses, and find powerful insights.

Linkody Online Tool

Linkody lets you know when you are gaining or losing links. Through this, you can analyze your link profile with a good chunk of metrics. This tool can be used to monitor your backlinks as well as your competitors and help you gain a competitive advantage.

So what’s next?

Once you have a list of all the backlinks, you can do one of the following steps:

1. Paste the website into hunter.io, find the relevant email and manually contact each website asking if they would be interested in adding any additional resources that link back to your site.
2. Add these URLs to an outreach tool and automatically contact all of them. (More tools, yay!)

Your turn!

This strategy almost guarantees that your whole neighborhood (that is online) will know about your business.

Just like with grasping any new concept, it might seem complicated at first, but once you get the hang of this strategy you will be surprised how quick it will be to monitor your rankings on Google Maps and add additional citations.

The process of using their helpful tools could easily become a monthly task. Will you stick to this process and have your local business known by your entire community?