Local Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Template for Small Businesses

Most local competitor analysis dies in the same place: a half-finished spreadsheet with three competitors listed, one column filled in, and a note to "come back to this" that never happens. The problem usually isn't motivation — it's that nobody wrote down which columns actually matter before opening the spreadsheet. Here's a template you can build in fifteen minutes and actually keep updated, plus the method for filling it in. Why this is worth doing properly Most owners already have an informal sense of their competition — the two or three names that come to mind when someone asks "who else does what you do." The problem with relying on that mental list is twofold. First, it's usually incomplete: the business that's actually eating into your search traffic is often not the one you'd name off the top of your head, because visibility and reputation in your industry don't always match who's been around longest or who you personally think of as "the competition." Second, even for the competitors you do know about, an informal sense of how you compare isn't the same as a number you can track over time. A proper local competitor analysis fixes both problems: it gives you the right list of competitors, not just the familiar one, and it turns "I think we're doing fine" into something you can actually check again in three months and see whether it's still true. It's also worth being honest about what this isn't. This isn't a pricing comparison or a list of their marketing taglines — plenty of competitor-analysis advice stops there, and it's the least useful part. What actually predicts whether a customer picks them over you is visibility and trust signals: do they show up when someone searches, what do strangers say about them, does an AI assistant recommend them. That's what this template tracks. Step 1: Build your competitor list first — don't skip this Before you open a spreadsheet, get the list of who to put in it. Finding your real local competitors is worth doing as its own step, because the obvious names — the other business you think about, the one with the big sign — are frequently not the ones actually ranking next to you or getting mentioned instead of you. Search the terms a customer would use ("[your service] near me," "[your service] in [your city]") and write down every business that shows up in the map pack or the first page of organic results, not just the ones you already recognized. Aim for 10 to 15 names for a first pass. That's enough to see real patterns without the analysis becoming a part-time job. Step 2: Set up the table Here's the column structure. You can build this in a spreadsheet in a few minutes — the specific tool doesn't matter, the columns do: ColumnWhat to put in itCompetitor nameAs it appears on their Google Business ProfileGoogle rating & review counte.g. 4.6★ (212)Review response rateRough estimate: scan their last 10 reviews, count how many have an owner replyMap pack presenceYes/No, for your 2–3 most important search termsEstimated share of searchSee Step 4 — a rough percentage, not exactAI mentionsMentioned / Not mentioned, across the assistants you checkIndependent mentions foundReddit, local blogs, "best of" roundups — count or note examplesNotesAnything specific — a tagline they use, a service angle, a weak point Put your own business in the first row. Everything after that is comparison, not a report about your competitors in isolation. Step 3: Fill in the easy columns first Google rating, review count, and map pack presence take the least time and are worth doing for the full list before you move to anything else. For each competitor: Search their business name plus city, note the star rating and review count from their Google Business Profile.Open their 10 most recent reviews and count how many have a visible owner response. This is a rough proxy for how actively they manage their reputation — a business replying to most reviews within a few days is paying attention in a way that shows up in how they're perceived.Search your 2–3 core terms and note, for each competitor, whether they appear in the three-listing map pack. This alone usually surfaces the first real insight: the competitor you assumed was "the big one" sometimes has a weaker review profile than you do, while a business you'd never thought of as competition is quietly outranking everyone. Step 4: Estimate share of search Share of search — what fraction of the branded search volume for your category goes to your name specifically, versus each competitor's — is the harder column to fill in, because it requires search volume data most owners don't have ready access to. The practical shortcut: use Google Trends to compare your business name against two or three competitors at a time (Trends allows direct comparisons and shows relative interest over time, even without exact volume numbers). You won't get a precise percentage this way, but you will get a reliable relative picture — whether you're the most-searched name in your category locally, roughly tied, or clearly behind. For a rough number instead of a relative comparison, Google's Keyword Planner can estimate monthly search volume for your business name versus competitors' names directly, though its ranges are wide and it won't return data for very low-volume local names. Either method gets you close enough for this table's purpose, which is spotting direction and gaps — not academic precision. Step 5: Check what AI assistants say For your 2–3 core search terms, ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini the question a customer would ask ("best [service] in [city]") and note which competitors get mentioned, in what order, and whether you're among them. This is the column most competitor-analysis templates from a few years ago don't include at all, and it's increasingly the one that explains a gap the other columns can't: a competitor with a similar review profile and similar map pack presence to yours can still be the one AI assistants recommend, because the underlying signals — review content, structured business data, independent mentions — don't always track with Google ranking. Step 6: Look for independent mentions Search each competitor's name on Reddit, in local Facebook groups if you have access, and alongside terms like "best [category] [city]" to catch roundup posts or local blog mentions. This column is the slowest to fill in and the easiest to skip — which is exactly why it's often where the real differentiator shows up. A competitor with an unremarkable Google profile but three or four organic Reddit recommendations is winning a kind of trust signal that doesn't show up anywhere else on this table. Step 7: Read the table, not just the numbers Once it's filled in, look for the column where you're clearly behind — not the one where you're clearly ahead, which is tempting to focus on but doesn't tell you what to fix. A pattern worth watching for: being roughly tied on Google rating and map pack presence, but behind on AI mentions and independent mentions. That combination usually means your on-platform reputation is fine, but nothing independent is vouching for you off-platform — which is a different problem than a weak review profile, and needs a different fix (getting mentioned, not just getting rated). A worked example of what this looks like in practice: say your table shows you and your closest competitor both sitting around 4.5 stars with roughly 150 reviews each, both in the map pack for your top two search terms. On paper, a tie. But your AI mentions column shows them coming up first in three out of four assistant checks, and your independent mentions column has two Reddit threads recommending them by name against zero for you. The Google-facing numbers say you're even; the off-platform numbers say they're pulling ahead in exactly the channels that are hardest to fix quickly. That's the gap worth acting on first, and it's one a review-count comparison alone would never have surfaced. Keep it updated, not perfect The table doesn't need to be exhaustive to be useful, and it loses most of its value if you build it once and never look at it again. A quarterly refresh — same competitors, same columns, 20 minutes — is enough to catch a competitor pulling ahead before it shows up as a slow month you can't explain. Skip the manual version Everything in this template is something Tailwind's Brand Visibility report checks automatically — Google's local results, independent mentions, AI answers across assistants, and an experimental visibility index that combines them — lined up against the 10 to 20 competitors you're actually competing with, not just the ones you thought to list. Run a local competitor visibility report and get the filled-in version of this table in about 30 seconds, free, no signup required for the first look.