The Competitor Who Overtook You

Start with what changed on their side

The instinct when overtaken is to look at your own site and start improving things, which is a reasonable response to the wrong question.

The more useful first move is to establish what they did, because a competitor who moved above you generally did something identifiable rather than benefiting from a mystery.

Most of that is visible from outside, without any tools, in about half an hour.

And in a large majority of local cases it turns out to be something ordinary that you could also do, which is a better finding than a budget you cannot match.

The four things to compare

• Reviews: count, rating, and the date of the newest.
• Pages: what they now have that they did not.
• Photographs: how many, and how recent.
• Listing completeness: category, services, attributes.

In local search the first is the most common answer by a considerable margin. A business that went from thirty reviews to a hundred and forty over a year has done the thing that moves local results, and it took them a year of asking.

Look at their site properly

Not for design, which is rarely the cause, but for what is now there.

Check their page count and structure against what you remember, since a site that has added twelve service pages has become more specific in a way that shows.

Their sitemap, usually reachable at a standard address, lists everything they have and takes a minute to read.

Look for pages targeting things you also do but describe only in passing, which is the most common structural difference.

And read one of their new pages properly. Frequently it is simply better: more specific, priced, with photographs of their own work.

Check whether they actually overtook you

A step worth taking before any of the above, because it is sometimes not true.

Results are personalised by location and history, so checking from your own premises on your own signed-in browser tells you very little.

Search from a private window, signed out, from the area your customers are actually in, and check several terms rather than one.

Also check whether your enquiries have changed, since a position change with no effect on enquiries may be a term nobody uses.

Businesses regularly spend a month reacting to a movement on one search that produced nothing either way.

A worked example

A business noticed a competitor consistently above them where the position had been reversed a year earlier.

Half an hour of looking found it.

The competitor had gone from about forty reviews to over two hundred, with the newest from that week. Their listing had every service itemised where it had previously had two. And they had added photographs continuously, ending the year with several hundred.

The website had barely changed.

None of that required money, and all of it required a routine they had kept for twelve months.

The response was to start the same routine, and the position recovered over roughly nine months, which was the honest timescale rather than a quick fix.

The answer is usually a routine

The pattern that recurs across almost every version of this.

Businesses that overtake competitors in local search rarely do it with a campaign. They do it by asking every customer for a review, photographing every job, and keeping the listing current, for a year.

Which is frustrating, because it cannot be replicated in a fortnight and there is nothing to buy.

It is also encouraging, because it is available to anybody willing to keep a habit, and the competitor's advantage is a lead rather than a moat.

Starting the same routine today puts you where they are in a year, which is a real answer even though it is a slow one.

Sometimes it is not replicable

Worth being honest about, since not every gap can be closed.

A competitor who is genuinely closer to your customers has an advantage in local results that no routine overcomes.

One with a substantially larger budget can outbid you indefinitely in advertising.

And one who has been established for twenty years has accumulated links, mentions, and reputation that cannot be assembled quickly.

Where that is the situation, the answer is not to compete on the same ground but to be more specific: a service they treat as an afterthought, an area they cover poorly, or a customer type they serve badly.

Do not copy the visible thing

A caution, because the natural response is imitation.

Copying a competitor's design, their wording, or their structure produces a second version of them, which is a poor position when a customer is choosing between two similar options.

What is worth copying is the mechanism rather than the appearance: the review routine, the photography habit, the completeness of the listing.

Those are practices rather than assets, and adopting them makes you better rather than making you a copy.

Where you find yourself replicating their pages, that is the point to stop and ask what you have that they do not.

The counter-case

This can become an unhealthy preoccupation.

A business that monitors a competitor weekly is spending attention on somebody else's business rather than its own, and the positions will move again regardless.

There is also a risk in attributing everything to the competitor. A drop can be your own doing: a site change, a listing edit that reverted, an update, or simply a quieter market.

Check your own numbers and your own recent changes before concluding anybody overtook anybody.

Do this once when you notice something, act on what you find, and then go back to your own business.

The half hour

1. Confirm it is real, signed out, from the right area.
2. Check whether enquiries actually changed.
3. Compare review counts and the newest dates.
4. Read their sitemap for pages they have added.
5. Count their photographs and check the dates.
6. Compare listing completeness against yours.
7. Copy the routine, not the appearance.

Step three answers this more often than the other six combined, and it takes about two minutes.

General competitor research is covered in what neighbouring businesses rank for.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.