Guide · Decisions
An hour with
three competitors.
Before paying anyone to tell you what to change, spend an hour on the sites already beating you. Everything in this guide can be done by a business owner with a phone, a laptop and no tools.
Published 2026-09-24 · Formory Group
Pick the right three.
Search the term a customer would use, with your city, on a phone, with location on. Take the three businesses that appear — in the map pack and in the results underneath. Those are your actual competitors for that search, which is often not who you think.
Do it for your two or three most valuable services separately. The competitive set changes between them more than owners expect.
Look at their listing before their site.
How many reviews, and how recent? What primary category are they using? Do they publish hours and a services list? Have they answered questions on the profile?
For most local searches this is where the decision happens. A competitor with a thinner website and a better listing will out-earn you, and fixing your listing is free.
Then five things on the site.
Does the first screen say what they do and where? Is there a page for each service or one list? Do they show prices or a range? Do they show their own work in photographs? Is there a way to make contact that is not a phone call?
Write down which of those five they do and you do not. That list, in that order, is your priority list, and it is usually shorter than any audit would produce.
What to ignore.
Their colour scheme, their animation, the fact that their site looks newer. Design differences are the most visible and the least consequential part of the comparison.
Also ignore any third-party “authority” score. Those are tool vendors' estimates that Google does not use, and comparing them tells you nothing you can act on.
Check what they are missing.
The opportunity is usually in what nobody in your market has bothered to do. Across the GTA we found 12,024 working business sites with no enquiry form at all and 11,503 listings with no opening hours — in most local markets, at least one obvious gap is shared by everyone competing.
Being the only local business that answers the price question plainly, or the only one reachable without a phone call, is a cheaper advantage than out-spending anyone.
Questions
Asked often.
How often should I do this?
Twice a year, and after any noticeable change in enquiries. Markets move slowly, but they do move.
What if the top results are directories, not businesses?
Then the realistic near-term goal is the map pack rather than the blue links, and getting listed properly on the directories themselves is worth an afternoon.
Should I copy what works for them?
Copy the structure, never the words. Their text is their evidence; yours has to be yours or it convinces nobody.
Now check your own
You have read the numbers.
Where does your site stand?
Type your address and we will open your site the way a visitor would, then tell you plainly what is wrong with it — including when the answer is nothing. Ten seconds, no email, nothing stored.
Think yours needs
rebuilding?
Send us the address and what you do. We will look at what is there and tell you whether a rebuild is worth the money, or whether the problem is somewhere else entirely.