Your local SEO competition with fewer reviews, a slower website, and no backlinks just took one of the top three spots in map pack from you.
Sound familiar? That exact complaint fills local SEO forums, and the answer is in a local SEO competitive analysis.
I’ll walk you through the version we run on our healthcare campaigns, step by step.
What a Local SEO Competitive Analysis Covers
A local SEO competitive analysis figures out which practices outrank you in local search, and why. The analysis covers the map pack and the organic listings. The profiles and pages feeding those results sit inside the scope too.
Google has separate ranking systems on the same results page. The organic listings still come down to links, content, and site quality. The map pack couldn’t care less about most of that. It runs on Google’s local system, which weighs proximity, relevance, and prominence.
A practice can win one system and lose the other. You can have position two in the organic listings and still not be found in the map pack. For a sense of the volume in play, we broke down 102,392 healthcare leads by source in our 2026 lead source study.
Find Out Who Your Local SEO Competition is
Your real competitors are whoever ranks in the top 3. It may not match who your referral rivals are (referrals mislead on this constantly), and it changes by procedure.
Open an incognito window and look up the procedures you want more of, with the city name. “Invisalign Austin.” “TMS therapy Denver.” Run each search on Google and again on Maps, then write down who ranks at the top of the map pack, first five organic spots.
Cap the list at three to five. Studying twelve competitors burns a week and changes nothing about what you’d fix first. A local competitor analysis built from live results beats one built from memory, hunches, and whatever the last conference speaker said.
The office across the street might barely be found online, while a multi-location group eats the implant keywords across your whole metro. I’ve watched practice owners aim an entire strategy at the wrong rival. Nobody had checked who Google thinks the competition is.
5 Things to Audit on Their Google Business Profiles
The profile drives the map pack, so the local SEO competition audit starts there. Pull up each competitor’s GBP and work through it the way the algorithm reads it. Categories first.
The primary category has more ranking impact than any other field on the profile. A “Cosmetic dentist” listing catches veneers and smile-makeover searches. A plain “Dentist” listing watches them go by. Categories first, primary and secondary, written down before you touch the rest of the profile.
Reviews come next. Pace over pile. A profile adding eight reviews a month out-signals one sitting on more reviews that aren’t as recent. Patients name procedures in their reviews, and those mentions feed relevance.
Watch how competitors answer their reviews too, because healthcare adds a wrinkle nobody outside the industry thinks about. A HIPAA-safe response never confirms the reviewer was a patient. Practices that get this right tend to run tighter marketing everywhere else. The ones replying “thanks for coming in Tuesday, Susan” just handed you two things at once, free of charge. A compliance slip and a marketing read.
Cross-check the platforms beyond Google while you’re in there. Our rundown of review sites that matter for healthcare practices covers which ones carry weight with patients and which ones you can skip.
Pull Their Keywords and Content Apart
To create a winning local SEO strategy in healthcare, it is important to analyze the top competitors in a given market.
Drop each competitor’s domain into Ahrefs Site Explorer and open the organic keywords report. Filter to positions 1 through 10. Scan for procedure terms with a city attached, because those queries produce their patients.
You’re hunting for two lists here. Keywords they rank for and you don’t, and keywords you both rank for, but they outrank you. Log the monthly search volume beside each one. Ahrefs shows the volume right there in the same report.
Then read everything they publish on the blog. Who writes it, and does a licensed clinician put a name behind the medical review? Google’s quality raters look for medical review on health content, and a byline with credentials beats a ghost blog. Check the publish dates too. A blog that went dark in 2024 usually means the agency churned, and rankings tend to slide after that.
The keyword half of this work feeds straight into your own keyword research process for healthcare practices, where the target list gets built.
Look Into Their Backlinks, Local Directories, and Citations
Where does a competitor’s authority come from? Backlinks answer that question, and the local ones point straight at a competitor’s community ties. Open the referring domains report in Ahrefs for each competitor and scan the sources.
You’ll spot the pattern fast. The local news feature, the chamber membership, the dental society directory, the charity 5K sponsorship. You can go earn every one of them. The full set becomes a working queue for your own local link building.
Citations run on a duller check. Run each competitor’s name plus the word “directory” through Google and note every listing that comes back. Then compare the name, address, and phone number on every one of those listings against the details your own website and profile show today. Sloppy NAP data on their end is an opening. Clean data on yours is the baseline Google expects before it trusts anything else.
Compare the On-Page and Technical Basics
Open each competitor’s top service pages and read them twice, once for the patient experience and once for the mechanics.
Title tags carry the fastest signal. A page titled “Dental Implants in Round Rock, TX” targets a real query, while one titled “Services” targets nothing a patient types. View the page source and hunt for “schema.org” next. Healthcare sites can run typed markup for MedicalOrganization, Physician, or Dentist, and most practices run none of it. Zero schema across all five competitors means the first practice to add it picks up a structured-data edge for cheap.
How many service pages do they run? One page per procedure out-targets a single “Our Services” wall, and the counting takes five minutes. Load speed rounds out the pass. Googlebot has a thing for pages that render fast on a phone. Patients bail on slow ones before the phone number appears.
Local Schema Markup
Schema markup is code that tells search engines what a page is about. Healthcare sites get their own types, MedicalOrganization, Physician, Dentist, and MedicalClinic among them. A practice page running Physician schema hands Google the provider’s name, specialty, and location in a format it trusts. So when a patient searches “cardiologist near me” or asks their phone the same thing, the marked-up practice earns the cleaner listing.
Build the Local SEO Competition Tracking Sheet as You Go
Everything above goes into one sheet. One row per competitor. The columns that earn their place, based on what you’ll re-check later, look like this.
Practice name and website. Primary and secondary GBP categories. Review count with the date you counted it, since the count means nothing without the date. Their top five procedure keywords and positions from Ahrefs. Referring domain count. A notes column for the odd stuff, the second office going up across town, the blog that woke up after a year of nothing.
Here’s a sheet you can use. It’s a Google sheet, so just click File > Make a Copy and it’s all yours.
Keep Watching Your Local SEO Competition After the First Audit
Your first local seo competition audit captures one date. The market keeps moving after that date. A competitor swaps their primary category, or a new group buys the office down the road. Your March notes stop matching what patients see in July.
So put the re-checks on a calendar.
- Monthly, check your rank tracker for movement on the procedure keywords from your sheet, map pack included.
- Monthly, glance at competitor review counts. Pace changes show up here first, and a sudden jump usually means they hired help.
- Quarterly, redo the whole GBP and content audit. Categories and services change with no announcement, no changelog, and no courtesy heads-up from anyone.
- After every named core update, re-check the board. You want to know whether a drop hit you alone or the whole market.
Set alerts where the tools allow it. Ahrefs flags new backlinks pointing at any domain you track. A competitor’s sudden run of local links is the earliest public signal of a new campaign. The links show up months before the rankings do. Watch their review responses too. A practice that starts answering every review just changed its marketing.
Start Outranking Your Local Competition
If you want to rank higher in Local SEO results, it is important to understand what your competitors are doing. With a little analysis, you can discover their strengths and weaknesses, and use that information to improve your own website ranking.
There are many factors involved in local organic competitive analysis – from keyword usage to content organization and on-page technical SEO. By taking the time to assess all of these areas, you can develop an optimization strategy for your site that will help you rise above the competition in Local search results.
If you want to get started without all of the guesswork, contact our team of local SEO experts to book a discovery call and we’ll walk your market together. Map pack and all.
