Local Competitive Intelligence

Let’s hear from David Mihm, Director of Local Search Strategy for Moz, talk about competitive intelligence in local search.

A lot of this lesson refers to our Local Ranking Factors. You may want to open it up for reference.

Google Maps

Let's talk about the art of figuring out your competition using Google Maps. We really like the new Google Maps interface. Unfortunately, it doesn't show you nearly as much competitor information as their old interface does. The new Google Maps is a very flat presentation. There is no hierarchy assigned to the businesses that show up for any given search phrase.

Type in whatever phrase you're interested in ranking for. In this case, we used "yoga studio in Boston," and here's the map that Google comes back with when we do that search.

One of the major ranking factors is something called proximity to centroid. Google tends to favor businesses that are located close to the civic center of a given geographic area. In Boston, in this example, the centroid is clearly Boston Common. It's a big public space, world-famous, everybody knows it. A lot of consumer activity is focused around it.

When you look at search results in Google Maps, you're really looking at business owners who are ranking high despite being pretty far away from the centroid. In Boston, you want to see which businesses are located kind of pretty far away from Boston Common, but still ranking highly in the results.

Then you can take this process one step further and actually zoom out on the map. Take a little bit of a wider view than the one Google is showing for kind of a downtown Boston search, and do the same thing, pick out the competitors that are ranking despite being miles and miles away from the centroid.

Those guys are the ones that you really want to pay attention to those four main criteria: their citation profile, their link profile, their review profile, and in some cases their website. Do they have a decent website or not? That's something you'll just have to eyeball. Are they using geographic terms in their title tags? Do they have a crawlable website? Do they have location information in HTML? Very, very basic things that most of you are probably already doing on your websites in order to rank.

Then you want to take a look at their citation profile, using either the MozBar or a third-party tool called Whitespark Local Citation Finder. Check out their profile in our backlink tool, Link Explorer, and then look at the top review sites in the industry in which you are trying to rank. Google will actually tell you the sites that they are looking at for reviews.

Citation Intelligence

Diving into the science of competitive intelligence, we'll start with citations. We definitely recommend plugging in not only your business but your competitors' businesses into Moz Local. See if they’ve taken care of kind of their baseline citation foundation. Chances are those competitors have taken care of this. You may as well check and see just how competitive your market is by using GetListed.

You can also use Whitespark. It's a very easy tool. Essentially, you type in your keyword, and this tool will spit back the list of sites that, in aggregate, your competitors are listed on most frequently. So that's what this matrix refers to.

You can see Yahoo, Yelp, Merchant Circle, and Yellow Pages, sites that we all recognize. Chances are most of the competition are listed on all these major sites. Keep in mind just doing a baseline level of citation submissions will probably give you a huge boost in the rankings.

You can also use the same process that Whitespark uses yourself, using Google to type in the full NAP information, that's business name, address, and phone number, as a search directly in the Google search bar. We’ll do the search, "yoga studios Boston" to see all the competitors that show up for that phrase. Then go one by one, typing in each competitor's NAP information into the search box on Google. You can export all of these lists of sites that Google returns for where these businesses appear into a CSV file in Excel and come up with essentially the exact same matrix that Whitespark provide.

Link Intelligence

The science behind link intelligence is pretty simple. Use Open Site Explorer, great tool offered by Mow. You just type in the URL. You want to do it at a domain level typically in local search. Type in the URL of the domain of your competitors, and this Open Site Explorer tool will show you a pretty good range of sites which that URL is getting links from.

This is obviously a major factor in organic search. It's a well-known tool in the traditional SEO space. But if you're new to local search, we would encourage you to check this one out as a great indicator how strong your local competitors are.

Review Intelligence

Review intelligence is not easy to into automate your research. Essentially, you want to see who is ranking in the local pack results, right on the main

Google search result page for your industry. That's really the only way to get this type of screenshot here and to see more reviews, where Google is pulling third-party reviews from.

Google will show you right there, actually within the seven pack or three pack or ten pack, the number of reviews that each business has on Google+. You have to actually mouse over and get this Knowledge Graph panel drop down to see other third-party sites that Google is pulling from reviews.

It's really important that you as a small business or your client's business are getting reviews from customers, not only on Google, but also on the third-party sites that Google is looking at. It's an important ranking factor to have a strong, kind of broad, diverse review profile, rather than just putting all your eggs in the Google+ basket.

Special Opportunities

When you're doing this research, pay special attention to things like this. I call them special opportunities that exist on third-party review sites. Usually these are things like best of lists or traveler's awards, or rewards on blogs. Google picks up on signals like this. Pay close attention and see if your business needs to be nominated for an award or “best of” list. You could have your favorite customer submit you for awards. When it comes to reviews, these are the opportunities that can make that difference, especially if you're trying to overcome centroid bias.

Organic Search Results

Your organic competition is a little bit harder to discern in local search these days because Google is blending so many results. They are combining who's ranking well in the organic algorithm with the Maps algorithms. Google has been blending both of these algorithms together in one list of results. After you do your Maps research for the competition you should look who's ranking great organically for your terms as well.

To do that, you can again type in your keyword and if you get the blended result you can use this search parameter — &start=1.

That will strip out the top organic search result, but it will show you everybody else ranked on organic basis for that keyword that you just typed in. This is really the best way to figure out who the competition is on the traditional ranking factors, things like especially inbound links to those websites, title tags, etc.

When you do this, much like you can with those full NAP searches, you can export these results to CSV and compare their link metrics across a wide range of criteria.

Looking at the Competition

In particular when you see these organic competitors overlaid, there are two different types of results that typically show up organically in local. Number one, you're looking at the size of business. Is it a national brand with a location page that's ranking here? Or is it a traditional small business with one website that encompasses all of the information about that business?

If you're competing against a national brand, that's a whole different range of factors, largely based on kind of the internal link juice that that brand is passing to that location. If it's a small business, that's where you can really dive into a lot of this Open Site Explorer research.

If they are small businesses that are ranking you've got to ballpark their website. Are they using best practices in terms of title tags? Do they have a clean navigational structure? Do they include their address in HTML? You're going to have to ballpark that kind of visually. How savvy do those businesses look?

Then, can you compete? So this is where you get into the two different types of results that show up for these local phrases. Sometimes you'll get big directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages.com, Super Pages or City Search. Google is evaluating results on big directories on a different set of factors than things a business will be able to compete on. Pay much more attention to the SMBs that are ranking for your phrases rather than those big national directories.

Check List

To kind of wrap up and sum up the checklist of things that you're trying to gauge when you're looking at local search results, we provide a checklist that you can fill out manually. It probably makes more sense for those of you familiar with Excel to put this in an Excel sheet.

Essentially you're looking at the number of citations that Google provides when you do a NAP search for that business. How far is that business from the centroid? How well are they either overcoming their bias or benefiting from that bias of centroid? Take a look at their backlink profile. Take a look at their website. Are they doing best practices? Then take a look at their review profile, not only on Google, but on trusted third-party sites.

Doing this kind of analysis should give you a pretty quick handle on how competitive this market is and hopefully identify opportunities for you to improve your own presence relative to the competition.