Competitor Research Is Dead, Do This Instead

Key Takeaways

If you're trying to rank on Google and you start with competitor research, you've already lost. Most people waste weeks pulling reports from AHFS or Semrush and trying to copy backlink strategies that don't tell them a single actionable thing about why their competitor is actually winning. So, in this video, I'm going to show you what Google actually rewards. I'm going to show you how to diagnose exactly what your site needs right now. and I'm going to give you the three paths that tell you exactly what you need to build to beat your competitors. This is the exact framework I've used to rank over 200 businesses and scale my agency to seven figures. So, let's start with the one thing that Google rewards above everything else. Google's algorithm doesn't really care about how many backlinks the site has nearly as much as you think it does. It really cares about one thing, goal completion. Does the user get what they came for? Did the user solve their problem? This is the universal truth of SEO and how Google's algorithm works. Whether you're running a national e-commerce brand, a massive blog, or a plumbing shop in Plano, Texas, Google wins when the user stops searching. If they search for a term, click on your link, and then never go back to Google to click another result, you win. That's the only signal that Google really cares about. But here's where we have to niche down because goal completion looks completely different depending on the game you're playing. For a blog or a news site, goal completion usually means consumption. The user reads the article, they stay on the page for a little bit. Maybe they scroll down to the bottom, but fundamentally they don't go back to the search results. For a local business, the goal is action. Did they click to call? Did they hit the get directions button? When they called, did you answer the phone? And Google knows the answer to those questions better than anyone else. Do you think they produced Chrome and Android and gave them out for free out of the goodness of their heart? Of course not. They spent billions building those free tools for one reason, to track user behavior and make their search algorithm better. They know exactly when someone finds the answer. They know exactly when someone clicks to call. They know if you answered the phone. And here is why traditional competitor research fails. When you fire up AHFS or Semrush, you're looking at vanity metrics. You can see their backlinks. You can see their estimated traffic, but you can't see the data that actually matters. No tool can show you click-through rate, phone calls generated, phone calls answered, how well those websites are doing at goal completion. You can't see how many people start calling the other businesses after calling that business. You're trying to reverse engineer their success while missing the most important part of why they're ranked where they are. You're making decisions based on an incomplete map. This is why I tell people to completely ignore domain rating or domain authority for local SEO. I see this every single day. A local plumber has a domain rating of five and they're absolutely crushing a national directory with a domain rating of 80 inside the map pack. Why? Because that high domain rating site has zero local relevance. It's a generic page trying to rank everywhere. The low DR site is hyperfocused on that specific city and that specific service. For local SEO, local relevance beats raw authority almost every single time. So if you can't rely on third party metrics and you can't see the data Google sees, what do you actually do? Step one is to stop guessing and run a proper local rank map. Don't just Google plumber near me from your phone. That tells you absolutely nothing about how well that business is ranking three miles down the road. You need to see the truth across the entire service area. At my agency, we use a tool called Lead Snap to run a grid search for primary keywords. I'm going to drop a link in the description that gives you half off for your first three months if you want to try that tool out. There are plenty of other tools that run grid searches. Also the goal you want to use this to see green dots where you're winning and the red dots where you're invisible. Let me show you a quick example. So this is an example of a local rank map. And if we look at this, we can see if I searched for window cleaning and I was standing right where the business is, I would show in the top three and I'd be super happy about being in the top three. But if I go anywhere else and do that same search, we can see that I'm nowhere to be found. Remember, fourth position is completely invisible. To see the fourth position, you need to click more businesses, which no one ever does. So, a rank map like this reveals exactly where your authority falls off the cliff. This is something a manual spot check is never going to show you. So, once you have this map, step two is to size up the fight. Now, most people skip this. They just assume that the competitor is ranking because of magic or secret backlinks. But usually the competitors are ranking because they have a bigger foundation and excellent goal completion. And we can check the foundation. Here's how. It's simple and it's free. Let me show you. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and start by typing in plumbers in Gary, Indiana. And I'm going to do something no one ever does. I'm going to hit more places and I'm just going to look for one to check here. I I usually like checking ones that have solid reviews, but they're not in the top three. So we'll do What do we have here? We have 700 reviews, 69 with a terrible overall rating and 22 reviews. Let's grab Green Piping Systems. They have 45 reviews. So, Green Piping Systems LLC. And then I'm going to go on over to Lead Snap. I'm going to go to new and I'm going to type in Green Piping Systems LLC and see if we can find it. As a quick side note, LLC should not be in your GBP business name. Google specifically says not to include LLC in there. Okay, so here we go. And then uh this is their rank map. And I can size this however I want to. And I can move that dot over there if I want to. So I can make this a little bit wider. All right, that's fine. So keywords and we'll do plumber Gary. And we'll run that scan. While this is running, I heard that the Chicago Bears are moving to Indiana. I think it would be absolutely fabulous if they changed their name to the Gary Bears. Just that would just be delightful for me. So, while this is still going, we'll double check what we're after here to see the foundation. We did see Green Piping System was ranked pretty low. So, let's see how big their website is. So, the way we do that, we hit site and then paste their domain in with no space. We'll hit enter. And then we'll do that with their top three competitors. I'll remove this UTM tracking. site website site website and site website. Okay, now our green pipe uh they have four indexed [snorts] results. Young plumbing has 179, AJ the plumber has five and Westgate plumbing services have 173. What we're doing here, this shows you exactly how many URLs Google has indexed for this website. If their two competitors have 200 index pages about plumbing and you have four, you don't have a backlink problem. You have a relevance problem. And we can see that our chosen plumber, Green Piping Systems, they have exactly four indexed URLs against two competitors with 175 or so. And look at the rank map. It's still pretty good. What this means is that they made relatively small changes to their website, added a few more pages to bring some additional relevance. We can see even if we look at the homepage that we're not, it's just not a very good website. Uh, and there's a variety of reasons why I'm saying that. We're missing the GBP embed, the title tag is wrong, we're missing social proof, we're missing the GBP reviews, we're missing content about the primary category, the secondary categories, we're missing content about the core services. Uh, the H1 primary heading is incorrect. There are a lot of things here on top of the fact that their website is just too small. If they fix these things, which could be done for less than $1,000, probably less than a few hundred, I would expect this rank map to look a lot better very quickly. If Green Piping Systems LLC is watching this, there's a real opportunity here for them. Now, there is one caveat here. If you see a website that has hundreds and hundreds of pages, then we might want to check the index and make sure that they haven't spent the last 3 years writing weekly blog posts about five ways to maintain your water heater. Those can be safely ignored. They're fluff. They do not add to local relevance. But if they have 200 pages of specific services and specific locations, this simple comparison tells you more than any domain rating score ever could. It tells you how much topical authority this competitor website has been able to build. Now, based on what the map and the index count tell you, you're going to fall into one of three diagnostic paths. Path one is a topical relevance issue. This shows up in two potential ways. Either your ranking for the primary category is basically non-existent. Or, and this is the one that tricks people, you have a decent map ranking for the primary category like plumber, but you're completely invisible for the high margin specific services like water heater replacement or main drain line replacement. You check the competitor's index and they have 20 pages dedicated to water heaters and you have one paragraph on your services page. This tells you you don't need links, you need depth. So, how do we do that? How do we check a competitor's index for how much content they have about water heaters? Let me show you. So, we'll go over to youngplumbing.com and remember this is telling Google, I only want to see results on this domain. And then we'll just put in water heater. And again, we can see 83 results. So, Young Plumbing has 83 pages of content that mention water heater. We can do the same check on this competitor that had 177 pages and they only had three. So, based on this, we can see that Young Plumbing has a lot more water heater content than Westgate Plumbing. So, if I rerun this rank map for water heater replacement, I'm still just thinking about the Gary Bears, man. I mean, that would be Man, I I hope it happens. I hope it happens. It It's sad for people in Chicago who lose the Bears, but man, the Gary Bears, how cool would that be? So, the rank map has filled in. And look at this. This is positive news for this plumber. They're not ranking particularly well for plumber, but they are ranking well for water heater replacement. Now, most plumbers care more about ranking for water heater replacement than they do ranking for plumber because this is a high margin search term. What this tells me is that not very many plumbers in Gary, Indiana, are hyperfocused on trying to rank for water heater replacement. So, Green Piping Systems has fallen in to the fact that they can rank for it because there's less competition for this service than there is for the service of plumber. So again, if they wanted to improve this and rank even higher, it's really just a matter of creating more content and creating more relevance about water heater replacement. Just for fun, let's see how many times water heater is mentioned on their website. One, one mention and their rank map looks this good. Imagine what the rank map would look like if they had 10 mentions. And this is where most people get this wrong. They're going to try to fix this by downloading a list of high volume keywords from ah refs. But I have an entire video on this channel where I break down exactly why keyword research is basically dead. If you want proof on why those old methods fail for keyword research, go watch that video. But for this diagnosis, you need to understand one thing. Google matches entities, not strings of text. It matches concepts. So instead of guessing, we're going to steal Google's homework using AI. Now I can take the content from the top three ranking competitors and feed it into Claude or ChatgPT. Then I can use a very specific prompt. I'm going to go ahead and put the prompt on the screen right now so you can screenshot it and use it yourself. But I also have it available to copy paste in my school community link in the description. Now if you run this prompt, it won't just give you water heater repair. It's going to give you thermouple and pilot light, anode rod, expansion tank, sediment flush. These are entities that prove to Google and other AI models that you are an expert, that you know what you're talking about. I had a client in Plano, Texas, a plumber, and we use this exact method. We didn't just write blog posts about fixing water heaters. That doesn't work. We built pages that covered every single entity related to that system. Within a couple months, he wasn't just ranking for plumber, though he absolutely was. He was dominating for every high ticket variation because our entity topical map was complete. Okay, so path two is geographical relevance. This is the most common issue I see. This is when your map is green on top of your office but turns red as you get four or five miles away. This tells me that you have trust. Google knows who you are, knows your business entity, and it trusts that your business entity does plumbing, but it doesn't see you as relevant to the neighbors next door. Now, the fix here is to not spam city name keywords on your homepage. That really doesn't work. It stopped working years ago, and in August of 2025, Google rolled out an update making that count as actual spam. Don't do spam. Google doesn't like it. Instead, we want to focus on this neighborhood overlay strategy. So, we're going to go to the map, which I have open here for green piping systems. And we're going to zoom in until we see geographic landmarks appear. Not cities, but the districts, the neighborhoods, the subdivisions, the parks, the lakes, the city buildings. Because Lead Snap uses a Google Map interface, it's already overlaid on Google Maps. If your map tool doesn't use Google Maps, you're going to want to overlay this on Google Maps because we want to look at geographical landmarks that Google recognizes. The way to make sure Google recognizes the geographic landmark is to use Google Maps. You guessed it. And then we're going to look for fours and fives and sixes. These are dots that we can much more easily turn into a three. If we turn a four into a three, that's 10 times 50 times the amount of traffic. If we turn a 15 into a four, that's roughly the same amount of traffic. That is zero. Let me show you what I mean. So, I'll zoom in here. Uh, and if I'm looking at these fours and fives, I can see Willow Creek. I can see Portage. I can see Lake Station. I can see the intersection of 90 and 94. These are all geographical landmarks. So, what we're going to do is build a specific page on the website for that neighborhood or landmark. We're not just going to swap the city name and publish the same generic content. We're going to write new content hyperfocused on that landmark, on that specific local geography. So the target keyword for that page is going to follow a specific format. It's going to be the service near the landmark in the city. So in this case, it might be water heater replacement near the intersection of 90 and 94 in Gary. Now, when we did this for a client in Houston, we didn't just target Houston. We built pages for the Heights, for the River Oaks, for the 610 Loop, for I 10 West, for the Houston Aquarium. We referenced local elements, local landmarks that proved we actually knew the area and we served that area. And the result, if you do this, you turn these yellow dots green one at a time. Okay. The third path is restructure. This is the hardest pill to swallow. This is when you look at the competitor's structure versus yours and you realize that you've crammed 10 different services onto a single page while they have a dedicated interlink silo for every single one. If your site is a flat mess of five pages and they have a structured hierarchy of 200, it's going to be very hard to optimize your way out of that hole. Now, I hate deleting content that's already indexed. I hate deleting content that is ranking. So, we don't have to completely nuke the site. We do have to reorganize it. You're going to want to take your mess and move it to a structure where your homepage links to your service and your secondary category pages, which then link to specific service pages below those category pages or subservices under the service pages. This creates a clear silo of authority that flows through your entire site. Mimic the exact structure that your GBP has. It can be painful to reorganize, but this is the only way to compete with giants who have built a proper library of content. So, this is why traditional competitor research is useless for local SEO. Most people will nail the diagnosis. They see the red dots, but then they freeze. They know they need topical relevance, but now what? Do you build 50 service pages? Do you write blog posts first? What actually moves the needle? So, in this next video, I'm going to break down my exact ranking process. What I build first, how I structure the content, and the exact order that I build everything in. So, click on that video before you touch another client's site.