Local SEO Competitor Analysis: A Sussex Business Guide

A local SEO competitor analysis is a structured comparison of your business against the firms that actually appear above you in Google Maps, the local pack and organic results for the searches your customers make. You list those rivals, compare their Google Business Profiles, reviews, website pages and links with yours, then turn the gaps into a short, ordered to-do list. This guide shows you how to do it step by step, with examples for Sussex trades and service businesses.

TL;DR

• Your search rivals are the businesses ranking for your key searches in your area, which are often not the firms you compete with offline.
• Google says local results rest mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, so compare rivals on profile completeness, reviews and links from other sites.
• Review freshness and monthly review pace can matter as much as your total count, so track both.
• Rank gaps by effort and likely enquiry value, fix the quick wins first, and repeat the analysis regularly because rivals keep changing.

Table of Contents

• What local SEO competitor analysis covers
• Step 1: Work out who your real search rivals are
• Step 2: Compare Google Business Profiles side by side
• Step 3: Look at reviews, and how fresh they are
• Step 4: Check websites, service pages and content
• Step 5: Citations, links and local mentions
• Step 6: Check how AI tools describe you and your rivals
• Turn your findings into a prioritised plan
• Our perspective
• Get the analysis done and acted on
• Keep it current: track and repeat
• FAQ
• Sources

What local SEO competitor analysis covers

The point is not to copy anyone. It is to see why a competitor sits where you want to be, and which of those reasons you can match or beat. A thorough analysis looks at six areas:

1. Google Business Profile (GBP): categories, services, photos, posts, hours, attributes and how complete the profile is.
2. Reviews: how many, how recent, how often, and how the owner replies.
3. Website content: service pages, location pages, topics covered, and how often they are updated.
4. Citations and consistency: your name, address and phone number across directories and platforms.
5. Links and local mentions: which local sites, news outlets and associations link to them.
6. Proximity and market position: where they are based relative to the searcher, and which areas they serve.

Google describes the starting point clearly. In its guidance on improving local ranking, local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence. Distance you cannot change much. Relevance and prominence you can, and that is exactly where a competitor comparison pays off.

Step 1: Work out who your real search rivals are

Most owners name the three firms they bump into on quotes. Google may rank a completely different set. A plumber in Worthing might lose most map pack impressions to a firm from Littlehampton, or to a national directory-style listing, rather than to the local plumber they know by name.

Build your list from search results, not memory:

1. Write down 8 to 12 searches a customer would type, such as “emergency electrician Brighton”, “loft conversion Horsham” or “CCTV installer Chichester”. Include the town name and the service.
2. Search each one in a private browser window, ideally from a phone, since local results are location-sensitive. Note the top three in the map pack and the top five organic results.
3. Tally how often each business appears. The ones that show up across many searches are your true rivals.
4. Repeat for two or three different towns in your service area. A firm that dominates Hove may be invisible in Bognor Regis.

Keep the final list to five or six businesses. More than that and the analysis becomes a research project instead of a decision tool.

If you cover several towns, remember that rivals differ per location. Our guide to the 90 day plan for service area SEO shows how to organise this around one core city page, which makes the town-by-town comparison far easier to act on.

Step 2: Compare Google Business Profiles side by side

The simplest working method is a spreadsheet. Martech’s guidance on competitive research suggests comparing your location with the top-ranked competitor for a given search, recording names, addresses, categories, linked URLs, hours, reviews and supporting factors such as attributes, services and photos.

Set it up with one row per business and these columns:

Google says that complete and accurate information helps a business appear for relevant searches, so every blank field on your profile is an easy gap to close. Categories are usually the quickest win. If three of the top four firms use a category you have not selected, check whether it truly describes what you do and add it.

If you want a more visual view of where you rank, rather than a single result from your office, a rank grid shows how your position changes block by block across a town. We walk through it in our map pack rank grid playbook.

Step 3: Look at reviews, and how fresh they are

Reviews are the part of a competitor’s profile that feels most unfair, because a firm with 300 reviews seems untouchable. In practice the picture is more nuanced. Search Engine Land’s profile audit guidance, written for a US audience, says the number of reviews a business gets each month and how recently its latest review was posted often outweigh total review count for important map pack positions.

That changes what you measure. For each rival, record:

• Total reviews and average rating.
• Approximately how many arrived in the past 90 days (scroll the reviews sorted by newest).
• The date of the most recent review.
• Whether the owner replies, and how quickly.
• What customers praise or complain about, in their own words.

The last point is underused. If reviews for a rival repeatedly mention punctuality, tidiness or clear quotes, those are the things local customers value in your trade. If they mention slow call-backs, that is an opening you can build your own service and your own reviews around.

Stars matter too, though the evidence is dated. Search Engine Land has cited a 2017 study suggesting that a rise from three to five stars could correlate with a 25% increase in click-through rate, but the same guide notes that more recent data is needed, so treat it as a direction rather than a forecast. You can read that in its guide to handling negative Google reviews.

The practical conclusion: a steady flow of new, specific reviews beats a one-off burst. Build a habit of asking every satisfied customer at job completion, with a direct link to your review form, and reply to every review you receive.

Step 4: Check websites, service pages and content

Your Business Profile gets you into the map pack, but your website supports it. Open each rival’s site and note:

• Service pages: do they have a separate page for each core service, or one page listing everything?
• Location pages: do they have pages for the towns they serve, with real local detail, or thin copy with the town name swapped?
• Content topics: do they publish guides, case studies or project write-ups that answer customer questions?
• Freshness: when were key pages last updated?
• Technical basics: mobile speed, clear phone number, local business schema markup.

Search Engine Journal’s piece on analysing local organic competition notes that competitor analysis can cover technical on-page factors such as locally optimised schema markup, along with content topics, average word count and update frequency. You do not need to count words for every page, but it is worth noticing when every top result has a detailed 1,000-word page and yours has a paragraph.

A quick worked example. Say you are a Chichester roofer. You search “roof repair Chichester” and the top three firms all have a dedicated roof repair page with photos of recent local jobs, a short FAQ and a visible quote form. Your own site covers roof repairs in a single line on a general services page. That is a clear, fixable gap: create a proper roof repair page, add real project photos and link it from your Business Profile.

The same logic applies to the keywords themselves. Search for your main terms plus common modifiers such as “emergency”, “cost”, “near me” and each town, and see which pages are ranking. Prioritise the terms where you offer the service, the searchers are likely to buy, and rivals’ pages are not overwhelmingly strong.

If you are unsure whether your own basics are in order before comparing, our local SEO checklist for Sussex service businesses covers them in one place.

Step 5: Citations, links and local mentions

Google notes that prominence is informed by signals including links from other websites and reviews. So after profiles and pages, look at who is vouching for your rivals.

Work through these checks for each competitor:

1. Local links: which Sussex sites link to them? Think chambers of commerce, trade bodies, local news, charity sponsorships, supplier pages and community blogs.
2. Directory listings: are they on the major directories and trade-specific ones? Is their name, address and phone number identical everywhere?
3. Press and mentions: have they been featured for a local job, award or community project?
4. Partnerships: do manufacturers or suppliers list them as approved installers?

The aim is to find links you could realistically earn too. If a rival is listed on a local business association site that you also qualify for, that is an easy target. If their links come from a national publication, that is probably out of reach for now, and you can set it aside.

Consistency on your own side matters just as much. Inconsistent business names or old phone numbers across listings muddy the signals Google uses. Our article on local SEO mistakes Sussex businesses make lists the most common ones and their fixes.

Step 6: Check how AI tools describe you and your rivals

Local discovery is no longer only blue links and map pins. Customers increasingly ask AI assistants for recommendations, so it is worth checking what these tools say about you and about the rivals on your list.

The UK’s Small Business Commissioner advises businesses to check how AI tools present them and to make sure their business name, description and product details match across their website, Google Business Profile and other platforms. Its guidance on agentic commerce also warns that businesses not structured for AI visibility risk becoming invisible.

A simple test: ask a few AI tools questions like “who is a reliable gas engineer in Hove?” and note who is named, how they are described and what sources seem to be used. Then compare:

• Is your business named at all?
• Are your services described correctly?
• Do rivals have details such as accreditations, areas covered and opening hours that you have not published clearly?

Consistent, clear information across your site and profiles is the best groundwork. If you run several branches, one clear page and one profile per location tends to work better than duplicates, as we explain in our piece on local SEO for UK branches.

Turn your findings into a prioritised plan

A spreadsheet full of observations is not a strategy. Take your comparison and sort every gap into three buckets.

Within each bucket, rank by two questions: how likely is this searcher to become an enquiry, and how big is the gap? A missing page for your highest-margin service beats a missing page for an occasional job. Seobility’s local audit guidance puts it plainly: prioritise keyword opportunities by search volume and competition, then address issues quickly.

Write each action as a task with an owner and a date, for example “add three secondary categories, Monday” or “publish Worthing boiler repair page, end of month”. Vague goals like “improve reviews” never get done.

Our perspective

We see the same pattern again and again with Sussex service businesses: the work that decides who wins the map pack is rarely glamorous. It is a complete profile, a steady flow of genuine reviews, a proper page for every service and a handful of credible local links.

The mistake we see most is treating competitor analysis as a one-off report. A firm in Brighton might do a flurry of research, fix three things and never look again, while a rival publishes, collects reviews and earns links every month. Visibility compounds, and so does neglect.

That is why we start with a pragmatic audit that looks for the unseen gaps in strategy or execution, then work through them hands-on rather than handing over a generic package. Local knowledge matters too: knowing which Sussex organisations, directories and communities carry weight in a town like Horsham or Bognor Regis is something no software dashboard will tell you.

If you have the time, do the first pass yourself using this guide. If you would rather spend your hours on jobs and customers, a specialist who does this every week will get to the answers faster and turn them into enquiries.

Harry

Get the analysis done and acted on

If you would rather not spend evenings in spreadsheets, we can do the competitor comparison and then carry out the fixes. Our SEO and GEO service covers local SEO, Google Business Profile optimisation, content, backlink building and visibility in AI search, with ongoing reporting so you can see what is changing. You can also see how our Essential, Grow and Transform plans differ on the services page.

We work with security companies, builders, installers and other trades across West and East Sussex, and our approach is tailored to each business rather than one-size-fits-all.

Keep it current: track and repeat

Competitors do not stand still. They gain reviews, publish pages, change categories and sometimes new ones appear. Seobility’s guidance says competitor analysis should be repeated because rivals change, and recommends monitoring visibility, ranking positions, target keywords, top pages and backlink profiles for new threats and opportunities.

A sustainable rhythm for a small business looks like this:

• Monthly (30 minutes): check your map pack position for your top five searches, count new reviews for you and each rival, and note any new posts or photos.
• Quarterly (half a day): repeat the full comparison, refresh the spreadsheet, and check for new entrants in each town you serve.
• After any change: note the date, so you can connect a rise or fall in calls to a specific action.

Measure what matters to the business: phone calls, form submissions, direction requests and quote requests from your profile and website, rather than rankings alone. A page one ranking that produces no enquiries is not a result. Google Business Profile performance data and your website analytics will show the trend. Our article on Google Business Profile posts for local trades explains how to keep the profile active in a way that fits current platform limits.

FAQ

How many competitors should I analyse?

Five or six is enough for most local businesses. Choose the firms that appear most often across your key searches in the towns you serve. Adding more rarely changes your priorities, but it does slow you down.

Do I need paid tools to analyse local competitors?

Not to start. Searching your key terms in a private window, reading rival profiles and websites, and recording the findings in a spreadsheet will reveal most of the important gaps. Paid tools help once you want to track rankings across many locations or monitor links at scale.

How often should I repeat a local SEO competitor analysis?

Do a light check monthly and a full comparison every quarter. Rivals change categories, collect reviews and publish new pages continually, so a single snapshot goes out of date quickly.

Are my offline competitors the same as my local SEO competitors?

Often not. Your search rivals are the businesses that rank for your customers’ searches in Google Maps, the local pack and organic results. That can include firms from neighbouring towns, or companies you rarely meet on jobs.

Sources

• Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, Google Business Profile Help
• Which Google Business Profile metrics matter most in multi-location competitive research, Martech
• 5-step Google Business Profile audit to improve local rankings, Search Engine Land
• How to handle negative Google reviews, Search Engine Land
• Analyzing your local organic search competition, Search Engine Journal
• Agentic commerce, Small Business Commissioner
• How to run a complete local SEO audit, Seobility Blog

Recommended

• Local SEO Checklist for Sussex Service Businesses
• Local SEO Mistakes Sussex Businesses Make (and Fixes)
• Content Marketing for Local Businesses: A Practical Sussex Guide
• 30–90 Day Local SEO Wins: 3 UK Case Studies and a Sussex Playbook