How to Perform a Basic Local Business Competitive Audit

Posted by MiriamEllis

“Why are those folks outranking me in Google’s local pack?”

If you or a client is asking this question, the answer lies in competitive analysis. You’ve got to stack Business A up against Business B to identify the strengths and weaknesses of both competitors, and then make an educated guess as to which factors Google is weighting most in the results for a specific search term.

Today, I’d like to share a real-world example of a random competitive audit, including a chart that depicts which factors I’ve investigated and explanatory tips and tools for how I came up with the numbers and facts. Also included: a downloadable version of the spreadsheet that you can use for your own company or clients. Your goal with this audit is to identify exactly how one player is winning the game so that you can create a to-do list for any company trying to move up in the rankings. Alternatively, some competitive audits can be defensive, identifying a dominant player’s weaknesses so that they can be corrected to ensure continued high rankings.

It’s my hope that seeing this audit in action will help you better answer the question of why “this person is outranking that person,” and that you may share with our community some analytical tips of your own!

The scenario:

Search term: Chinese Restaurant San Rafael

Statistics about San Rafael: A large town of approximately 22 square miles in the San Francisco Bay Area with a population of 58,954 and 15+ Chinese restaurants.

Consistency of results: From 20 miles away to 2000+ miles away, Ping’s Chinese Cuisine outranks Yet Wah Restaurant in Google’s local pack for the search term. We don’t look closer than 20 miles, or proximity of the searcher creates too much diversity.

The challenge: Why is Ping’s Chinese Cuisine outranking Yet Wah Restaurant in Google’s Local Pack for the search term?

The comparison chart

*Where there’s a clear winner, it’s noted in bolded, italicized text.

Basic business information
NAP	Ping’s Chinese Cuisine 248 Northgate Dr. San Rafael, CA 94903 (415) 492-8808	Yet Wah Restaurant 1238 4th St. San Rafael, CA 94901 (415) 460-9883
GMB landing page URL	http://pingsnorthgate.com/	http://www.yetwahchinese.com/
Local Pack rank	1	2
Organic rank	17	5
Organic rank among business-owned sites *Remove directories and review platforms from the equation, as they typically shouldn’t be viewed as direct competitors	8	1
Business model eligible for GMB listing at this address? *Check Google’s Guidelines if unsure: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177...	Yes	Yes
Oddities	Note that Ping’s has redirected pingschinesecuisine.com to pingsnorthgate.com. Ping’s also has a www and non-www version of pingsnorthgate.com.	A 2nd website for same business at same location with same phone number: http://yetwahsanrafael.com/. This website is ranking directly below the authoritative (GMB-linked) website for this business in organic SERP for the search in question.
Business listings
GMB review count	32	38
GMB review rating	4.1	3.8
Most recent GMB review *Sort GMB reviews by "most recent" filter	1 week ago	1 month ago
Proper GMB categories?	Yes	Yes
Estimated age of GMB listing *Estimated by date of oldest reviews and photos, but can only be seen as an estimate	At least 2 years old	At least 6 years old
Moz Local score (completeness + accuracy + lack of duplicates) *Tool: https://moz.com/local/search	49%	75%
Moz Local duplicate findings *Tool: https://moz.com/local/search	0	1 (Facebook)
Keywords in GMB name	chinese	restaurant
Keywords in GMB website landing page title tag	Nothing at all. Just “home page”	Yes
Spam in GMB title *Look at GMB photos, Google Streetview, and the website to check for inconsistencies	No	Yes: “restaurant” not in website logo or street level signage
Hours and photos on GMB?	Yes	Yes
Proximity to city centroid *Look up city by name in Google Maps and see where it places the name of the city on the map. That’s the city “centroid.” Get driving directions from the business to an address located in the centroid.	3.5 miles	410.1 feet
Proximity to nearest competitor *Zoom in on Google map to surface as many adjacent competitors as possible. Can be a Possum factor in some cases.	1.1 mile	0.2 miles
Within Google Maps boundaries? *Look up city by name in Google Maps and note the pink border via which Google designates that city’s boundaries	Yes	Yes
Website
Age of domain *Tool: http://smallseotools.com/domain-age-checker/	March 2013	August 2011
Domain Authority *Tool: https://moz.com/products/pro/seo-toolbar	16	8
GMB Landing Page Authority *Tool: https://moz.com/products/pro/seo-toolbar	30	21
Links to domain *Tool: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/	53	2
DA/PA of most authoritative link earned *Tool: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/	72/32	38/16
Evaluation of website content *This is a first-pass, visual gut check, just reading through the top-level pages of the website to see how they strike you in terms of quality.	Extremely thin, just adequate to identify restaurant. At least has menu on own site. Of the 2 sites, this one has the most total text, by virtue of a sentence on the homepage and menus in real text.	Extremely thin, almost zero text on homepage, menu link goes to another website.
Evaluation of website design	Outdated	Outdated, mostly images
Evaluation of website UX	Can be navigated, but few directives or CTAs	Can be navigated, but few directives or CTAs
Mobile-friendly *Tool: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly	Basic mobile design, but Google’s mobile-friendly test tool says both www and non-www cannot be reached because it’s unavailable or blocked by robots txt. They have disallowed scripts, photos, Flash, images, and plugins. This needs to be further investigated and resolved. Mobile site URL is http://pingsnorthgate.com/#2962. Both this URL and the other domains are failing Google’s test.	Basic mobile design passes Google’s mobile-friendly test
Evaluation of overall onsite SEO *A first-pass visual look at the page code of top level pages, checking for titles, descriptions, header tags, schema, + the presence of problems like Flash.	Pretty much no optimization	Minimal, indeed, but a little bit of effort made. Some title tags, some schema, some header tags.
HTML NAP on website?	Yes	Yes
Website NAP matches GMB NAP?	No (Northgate One instead of Northgate Drive)	Yes
Total number of wins: Ping’s 7, Yet Wah 9.

Download your own version of my competitive audit spreadsheet by making a copy of the file.

Takeaways from the comparison chart

Yet Wah significantly outranks Ping’s in the organic results, but is being beaten by them in the Local Pack. Looking at the organic factors, we see evidence that, despite the fact that Ping’s has greater DA, greater PA of the GMB landing page, more links, and stronger links, they are not outranking Yet Wah organically. This is something of a surprise that leads us to look at their content and on-page SEO.

While Ping’s has slightly better text content on their website, they have almost done almost zero optimization work, their URLs have canonical issues, and their robots.txt isn’t properly configured. Yet Wah has almost no on-site content, but they have modestly optimized their title tags, implemented H tags and some schema, and their site passes Google’s mobile-friendly test.

So, our theory regarding Yet Wah’s superior organic ranking is that, in this particular case, Yet Wah’s moderate efforts with on-page SEO have managed to beat out Ping’s superior DA/PA/link metrics. Yet Wah’s website is also a couple of years older than Ping’s.

All that being said, Yet Wah’s organic win is failing to translate into a local win for them. How can we explain Ping’s local win? Ping’s has a slightly higher overall review rating, higher DA and GMB landing page PA, more total links, and higher authority links. They also have slightly more text content on their website, even if it’s not optimized.

So, our theory regarding Ping’s superior local rank is that, in this particular case, website authority/links appear to be winning the day for Ping’s. And the basic website text they have could possibly be contributing, despite lack of optimization.

In sum, basic on-page SEO appears to be contributing to Yet Wah’s organic win, while DA/PA/links appear to be contributing to Ping’s local win.

Things that bother me

I chose this competitive scenario at random, because when I took an initial look at the local and organic rankings, they bothered me a little. I would have expected Yet Wah to be first in the local pack if they were first in organic. I see local and organic rankings correlate strongly so much of the time, that this case seemed odd to me.

By the end of the audit, I’ve come up with a working theory, but I’m not 100% satisfied with it. It makes me ask questions like:

• Is Ping’s better local rank stemming from some hidden factor no one knows about?
• In this particular case, why is Google appearing to value Ping’s links more that Yet Wah’s on-page SEO in determining local rank? Would I see this same trend across the board if I analyzed 1,000 restaurants? The industry says links are huge in local SEO right now. I guess we’re seeing proof of that here.
• Why isn’t Google weighting Yet Wah’s superior citation set more than they apparently are? Ping’s citations are in bad shape. I’ve seen citation health play a much greater apparent role in other audits, but something feels weird here.
• Why isn’t Google “punishing” Yet Wah in the organic results for that second website with duplicate NAP on it? That seems like it should matter.
• Why isn’t age factoring in more here? My inspection shows that Yet Wah’s domain and GMB listing are significantly older. This could be moving the organic needle for them, but it’s not moving the local one.
• Could user behavior be making Ping’s the local winner? This is a huge open question at the end of my basic aud
  
  source https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit