Multi-location businesses face the daunting challenge of staying competitive in local search results in various local markets, which requires more than just a broad national or regional local SEO strategy.
What multi-location brands need to truly succeed in local search is a hyperlocal strategy, which involves doing in-depth local SEO competitor analysis for each location.
This type of competitive analysis plays a significant role in ensuring that each location optimizes its performance to meet unique market conditions, resulting in higher brand visibility across all target areas.
What Is Local SEO Competitor Analysis?
Local SEO competitor analysis is the process of monitoring and evaluating the local search performance of your competitors to identify who is ranking well in a specific target area. It involves analyzing their strategies for optimizing Google Business Profile, keyword targeting, customer reviews, and other local SEO factors.
The goal of local SEO competitor analysis is not only to understand who is successful in local search, but also why they’re performing well. It helps businesses identify opportunities and threats, refine local SEO strategies, improve rankings, and attract more nearby customers in each and every area they serve.
Local SEO Competitor Analysis for Multi-Location Businesses: When and Why To Do It
When You Want To Identify True Competitors for Each Location
For multi-location brands, it’s common to have a clear sense of who your major competitors are at the national or even the regional level, but this understanding doesn’t always translate accurately to the on-the-ground competition at a local level.
The reality is that your competition can vary significantly from one location to the next, making it essential to identify your true competitors in each market through local SEO competitor analysis.
While your main competitor on a national scale might be a large brand with strong online visibility in many areas, local competitors can include smaller businesses that rank highly in local search results but fly under your radar.
When you focus on analyzing local competitors on a location-by-location basis, you may discover businesses that were not previously known to you, but are outperforming you in local search for key terms, meaning they’re capturing a share of your potential customers!
Recognizing who these true local competitors are will allow you to better tailor your SEO and digital marketing efforts for each location. Instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all strategy, you can focus on addressing specific challenges and opportunities unique to each local market.
When You’re Considering Expanding Into New Local Markets
For multi-location businesses, expanding into new geographic markets is a key growth strategy. However, before launching in any new location, you should always thoroughly analyze the local competitive landscape to evaluate opportunities and assess risks.
Understanding who the key players are in a given market and how their performance in local search may affect your expansion efforts can even help you prioritize expansions. For example, if there are three markets you’re considering entering, you might prioritize the two with the least-fierce competition to get a stronger ROI.
When Competitors Launch New Locations
Local SEO competitor analysis isn’t just something you should do when you’re considering expansion — it’s also essential to conduct analysis whenever new competitors enter your existing markets.
Through this analysis, you can assess a new entrant’s local search performance and market positioning, determine how they may be able to capture some of your market share, and adapt accordingly to mitigate risks and maintain a strong presence in local search results.
When You Notice Varying Performance Across Locations
Multi-location businesses often experience inconsistent local search performance across different locations. While some locations may dominate local search rankings, others might be struggling, leading to a disparity in traffic and sales. This disparity can be due to a variety of factors, but the local competition typically plays a huge role.
Local SEO competitor analysis helps you determine why certain locations are underperforming compared to their local competition. For instance, it could be that competitors in those areas have more optimized Google Business Profiles or a larger volume of positive Google reviews.
Armed with these insights, you can then take corrective actions, such as optimizing Google Business Profile to better match local preferences or analyzing competitor reviews and implementing business changes to improve your own reviews.
When Tracking the Success of Local SEO Strategies
Finally, local SEO competitive analysis should be an integral part of the process when it comes to tracking the ongoing performance of your local SEO strategies across locations.
Multi-location businesses often face difficulties in maintaining consistency across locations while continuously tailoring local SEO efforts to meet the specific needs of each market.
By continuously analyzing competitors’ local search performance, you can identify new optimization opportunities and continue to refine your own approach, ensuring that each location is visible to nearby customers actively searching for products or services like yours.
What To Remember
For multi-location businesses, local SEO competitor analysis is a powerful tool for maintaining and improving visibility in local search amidst constantly shifting market conditions.
Analyzing each market individually — treating each location and its competition as the unique local entities they are — helps you build stronger local SEO strategies in order to outrank the competition at a hyperlocal level.
Ultimately, this boosts your overall brand visibility and helps drive sales across all the different geographic areas you serve!
