A few days ago we shared a free tool to check the health of your Google Business Profile. If you ran it, you’ll now have a clear picture of where your own profile stands.
But there’s a question that audit can’t answer on its own: how does that compare to the businesses actually outranking you?
Because here’s the thing — local SEO isn’t really a pass/fail test. It’s relative. You don’t need a perfect profile, you need a better one than the businesses currently sitting above you in the map pack. Sometimes that’s a small gap. Sometimes it’s a much bigger one. Either way, you can’t close it without knowing what it actually is.
What “beating your competitors” actually means in practice
We see business owners get this wrong in two directions. Some assume they’re hopelessly behind and don’t bother trying. Others assume they’re doing fine because they “look the same” as the competition — same kind of website, similar reviews, similar service pages — and can’t work out why they’re still not showing up.
In both cases, the missing piece is the same: nobody has actually sat down and compared, point by point, what the businesses ranking above you are doing differently. Not vague stuff like “they’re more established” — specific, fixable things like category choices, review velocity, posting frequency, and how their service pages are structured.
A free tool that does exactly this
So we built a second free tool that takes the same data behind the GBP audit and turns it into a practical “How to Beat Your Competitors” plan.
It looks at where you currently sit against the local competition and gives you a prioritised set of actions — the kind of thing we’d normally only hand over after a paid audit. Things like:
- Where your competitors are pulling ahead, and by how much
- The specific gaps that are realistic to close in weeks, not months
- What’s actually worth your time versus what’s just noise
The goal isn’t to overwhelm you with a 40-point checklist. It’s to show you the two or three things that would move the needle fastest, because that’s usually all it takes to start climbing.
Why we’re giving this away
We could keep this kind of analysis to ourselves until you’ve onboarded as a client. But most business owners want to understand the why before they commit to anything — and frankly, if the plan shows there isn’t much to fix, that’s a perfectly good outcome too. We’d rather you knew that for free than paid us to find out.
Get your free competitor marketing plan →
Same as the GBP audit — a minute of your time, results straight to your inbox.
Next time: once you know what needs fixing, the question becomes how to actually execute it — starting with the channel most businesses neglect the most: social media. We’ll show you a free 4-week plan to fix that.