How to Track Your Competitors Using Brightlocal

If you’re wondering who your competitors are, what their local SEO strategies are, and if there’s a gap in the market for you to exploit, then you’ve come to the right place. 

In this overview, we’re to show you how to use BrightLocal’s tools to map your competitive landscape and pinpoint opportunities for growth.

The four BrightLocal tools to help you crush your competitors are:

  1. Google My Business Audit
  2. Local Search Rank Checker report
  3. Citation Tracker report
  4. Local Search Audit 

Let’s take a look at a Google My Business Audit first.

1. Tracking Your Competitors with a Google My Business Audit

A Google My Business Audit lets you quickly assess the status of your Google My Business profile and how it compares to your top online competitors.

It uses your business location and business type to identify the competitors which are ranking top in the local pack for the search terms and search the location you’ve chosen.

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

The audit is split into corresponding search terms based on your business type and reveals nuggets of information about your competitors such as:

  • the number of citations, links, and reviews they have
  • their star ratings and number of photos on Google
  • the primary business category they’re using
  • their website authority

This data is benchmarked against your own so you can see the areas that may be helping their search rankings that you may not have focused on, giving you some really actionable insights. 

For instance, in the Google My Business Audit report below, we can see that Sodoma Law is ranking in sixth position for the search term ‘divorce attorney’. We can also see that Arnold & Smith, Collins Family Law Group, and McIlveen Family Law Firm are their three main competitors because they rank in first, second, and third positions, respectively. 

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

Working our way across the table, we can see that Sodoma Law has more citations and website authority (a score that predicts your website’s ability to rank on search engine results pages) than the top three companies, but far fewer reviews. So, to try to rank higher for the search term divorce attorney, they need to gain more high-quality reviews (which our Reputation Manager tool is perfect for).

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

See the below Help Center articles for more information on setting up and understanding a Google My Business Audit report:

2. Tracking Your Competitors with a Local Search Rank Checker Report

Next on the list is a Local Search Rank Checker report. This is a great way to see how your rankings benchmark against your competitors.

To track your competitors in a Local Search Rank Checker report, you can add a maximum of four competitors to the section called ‘Monitor competitor search rankings’ when you set it up.

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

If your report is already set up, you can add competitors by going to ‘Actions’, selecting ‘Edit Report’ and then scrolling down to the Advanced Settings where you can click on the ‘Competitors’ tab.

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

Not sure who your competitors are? The best way to learn is to search for a term related to your business, such as ‘lawyers Charlotte NC’ and see who appears in the local pack or ahead of you in terms of their local positioning. 

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

When your report is finished, there will be an additional tab called ‘Competitors’ where you can see how your competitors rank for different keywords in the different search engines. 

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

For example, the image below shows where Sodoma Law ranks for certain keywords on Google. In the Rank column the letters A, B, and C indicate where the solicitor appears in the Local Pack and the numbers show their overall ranking position on Google. A dash means we didn’t find any mention of the business in the top 50 results. 

Sodoma Law currently ranks B for the keywords ‘Family Lawyer’, but doesn’t appear in the top 50 results for any of the other keywords. Two of their competitors rank in positions A and B for the keywords ‘Best Lawyers’. To bump the two competitors off their top spots they will need to include the keywords ‘Best Lawyers’ throughout their content.

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

See the below Help Center articles for more information on setting up and understanding a Local Search Rank Checker report:

3. Tracking Your Competitors with a Citation Tracker Report

Third on the list is the Citation Tracker report, which lets you monitor competitor citations and helps you to fill any gaps. We find the competitors by looking for what businesses are ranking top in Google Maps for the business type + location (e.g. plumbers in manhattan).

Once you’ve run your Citation Tracker report, you’ll see a tab called Competitor Citations. Here you’ll be able to see a list of citations and business mentions that your top five competitors in search have, excluding any that you already have. 

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

To discover who your competitors are, simply click on the red pins. 

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

For a better understanding of the citations that are worth you registering for, take a look at the Citation Authority and Citation Value columns. 

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

Citation Authority is based on Domain Authority, a metric calculated by Moz. It’s the SEO score for a website and a prediction of its ability to rank well in search engines. This is calculated out of 100. The higher the number, the more influence that site may have.

Citation Value is unique to BrightLocal. It’s determined using the frequency with which a website appears in citation records. The more a website is used as a citation source, the higher its value. These values are calculated from unique research conducted by BrightLocal.

If there are any citations in the table that have high Citation Value and/or Citation Authority scores, they would be good to go after first. 

To do that, in the column called ‘Actions’, click the ‘+’ icon and you’ll be taken straight to the citation site. Once there, you should be able to fill in your business details to register a citation request. Keep in mind that your citation may not be added to a directory immediately. 

Alternatively, check out Citation Builder, where we do the hard work for you by building citations on key sites, cleaning up your existing citations, and removing harmful duplicates.

See the below Help Center articles for more information on setting up and understanding a Citation Tracker report:

4. Tracking Your Competitors with a Local Search Audit

Another great source of competitor information in BrightLocal is a Local Search Audit

In a Local Search Audit, under the ‘Links & Website Authority’ heading, you’ll find the average score for your competitors, as well as your business scores on the following:

  • Google Index Count: the number of pages that Google has indexed on your site
  • Link Count: the number of links that lead from other websites through to yours
  • Linking Domains: the number of websites that link to your website
  • Majestic C Flow: a link-related score that’s calculated based on the number of inbound links your website has 
  • Domain Authority: a search engine ranking score that predicts your website’s ability to rank on search engine results pages

How to Track Your Competitors Using BrightLocal

Your aim should be to rank higher than the competitor average for each of these, so this table gives you great insight into where you might want to prioritize your efforts first and in the future.

For example, if your number of Linking Domains is below your competitor average, then reaching out to trusted websites and asking them to link back to yours would be a good place to start.

See the below Help Center articles for more information on setting up and understanding a Local Search Audit:

Your next steps

To get the edge on your competitors, set up these four reports to track their local SEO efforts and plan your next moves. 

The BrightLocal Help Center has information on how to create and read all of these reports, and the Bright Ideas section on our website has advice on how to improve all aspects of local SEO from link building and review generation to Google My Business optimization.

The post How to Track Your Competitors Using Brightlocal appeared first on BrightLocal.

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