Three companies sit above you for everything you sell, and nobody has told you what they have that you do not. A competitor analysis answers that. We name the businesses winning the searches in your market, work out what each one does to hold that spot, and hand you the gaps in the order we would close them.
Book a free consultation →A competitor analysis is paid research with one job: work out who is winning the searches you want, why, and the shortest route past them. The output is a written comparison of your business against a named set of rivals, gap by gap, with the gaps ranked. You buy it once.
The first surprise is usually the list. The companies beating you in search are often not the ones you bid against. A national directory takes the top slot and sells your own call back to you. A franchise page from a company with no truck in your county holds the next. A review site's best-of list for your city outranks every business named on it. Meanwhile the shop across town you have watched for a decade never appears. A plan built on the wrong rivals is built on nothing.
Nobody buys this out of curiosity. Owners arrive with a symptom:
This is the outward-looking half of the ongoing SEO program. That page covers the month-to-month work. This one covers the deliverable that decides who you are racing.
Competitor research is the easiest thing in this business to invent, because the person paying for it cannot check the other company's side of it. So here is what a real one contains, and what to demand from anybody selling it, us included. It arrives in writing, with the rival pages and the dated results we read attached to it.
You keep the document. Hand it to your own developer or another agency and it still works.
It opens with a free consult, by phone or video. You name the companies you believe you compete with. That list matters whether it is right or wrong, because half the value here is the distance between the rivals in your head and the ones the results actually hold.
We also ask which jobs you want more of. Passing somebody on a search that brings work you do not want is an expensive way to lose. A roofer chasing full replacements is in a different race from one who wants repair calls, and the comparison is built around your race.
Two things get agreed in writing before the real work starts: the searches we judge you on, and the competitors we study. You approve both, which keeps a week from disappearing into a company you have not competed with in years.
You send read-only invites to GA4 and Search Console, plus the Business Profile if you work a service area. We are not diagnosing your site here, so that is all we need: enough to place you on the same board as the companies above you. Everything on their side is public, and none of it asks anything of them.
We are Orlando based, working nationwide with local service businesses since 2008, which matters less here than on almost anything else we sell. The comparison is read from inside your market, not ours, so a metro we have never driven through is no handicap. Living in a town does not tell you who holds its search results anyway. Owners are routinely wrong about their own.
You see the competitor set first, then the document, then we read it with you on a call instead of emailing a file and disappearing. The flat quote and a delivery date go in writing before you commit.
Plenty of competitor reports state things nobody outside that company could know. Here is the line we draw, so you can hold any provider to the same one.
Verifiable, and reported as fact. Every page they publish and what each is about, their titles and structure, how their pages link to each other, their categories and the review count showing the day we looked, which pages hold position from a given place, who links to them, and how their pages measure on speed and markup. All public, all recorded with dates.
Estimated, and labeled as an estimate. Third-party traffic and search volume figures come out of models. They help sort one search above another. They are not that company's analytics, and anyone handing you a rival's visitor count as a fact is guessing with a straight face.
Not knowable at all. How many of their calls turn into jobs, what a lead costs them, what they charge, whether the business makes money. A company can be highly visible and quietly losing. Same with ads: we can show you who buys the paid slots, but what they pay is between them and Google, and competing there is Google Ads work with its own quote.
Rankings also move with who is searching and where they stand, so a snapshot from one laptop in one town gets labeled as one.
There is also work we will not take: nothing that touches their business, no fake reviews, no reporting a rival for sport, no buying links to point anywhere. We spend the effort on your side of the comparison. Anything else risks your own domain to inconvenience somebody else.
It earns its fee when the field is crowded enough that guessing gets expensive. As a worked example, say a moving company with four branches across a metro, where the three names sitting above it for every search are not moving companies at all: a van line's franchise page, a directory that resells your own call back to you, and a magazine's best-of list. Each of those is a hundred pages deep, and none of them is passed the same way. Chase the wrong one and the year is gone.
The clear cases: you are about to sign a retainer or fund a rebuild and want the hill measured before you dig, you lost ground to one specific company and want to know what changed on their side, or you are expanding into a new town or service line and that ground is unknown to you.
The cases where we will tell you to keep your money, starting with the obvious one: if everybody already agrees the leader has two hundred pages and you have eight, paying us to confirm it buys you a document and a lost month.
A competitor analysis identifies the target. It does not close the distance. Every gap on the list has a home:
Two neighbors look alike from a distance and are not. If traffic fell away on a specific date, the cause is rarely a rival improving that morning, and algorithm recovery starts at the drop instead. If one passed you right after your redesign, the culprit is usually the move, which is website migration.
The picture goes stale, too. In a busy market the winners are not the same set a year later, which is why refreshing it belongs inside the ongoing SEO program rather than being bought once and filed.
This one is not on the price list either, and the reason is the market rather than the website: a small town with a short list of rivals and a crowded metro are nowhere near the same piece of work. So it gets scoped on the call, quoted flat after the free consult, and the figure holds from there.
What changes the number:
Most of the time this arrives inside the ongoing SEO program rather than on an invoice of its own. That runs $1,500 to $3,500 a month for most businesses, and $3,500 to $7,500 a month in competitive metros or for multi-location companies. The SEO cost guide covers what drives the figure, and the free what should you pay tool answers it for your situation.
Before you pay anybody, do the free version of the first hour. More than 50 free tools are published at kellywm.com/tools, no email wall, and the move most owners miss is pointing them at the competitor as well as at themselves. Run their homepage through the website report card beside yours, check whether AI answers name them and not you with the AI visibility checker, and set the profiles side by side with the Business Profile audit. None of it replaces the comparison, and all of it is free.
One expectation worth setting now: closing a gap takes far longer than finding it, and how long SEO takes is the honest version of that timeline. Everything is month to month, no long-term contract, and you own the site, the content, the accounts, and the document.
Not as a fact. Nobody outside their business holds their analytics. Third-party tools produce an estimate out of a model, and we show those figures labeled as estimates, because they help sort one search above another. What we state plainly is the public part: their pages, their structure, their links, their profile, and where they sit for the searches you care about.
Both, and the difference between the two lists is often the most useful page in the document. You give us the companies you bid against and lose jobs to. We come back with the companies actually holding the searches you want. Where those two lists disagree is usually where your money has been quietly going.
No. An audit looks inward and asks what is wrong with your own site. A competitor analysis looks outward and asks who is winning and why. They answer different questions and often get bought together, because learning a rival publishes forty pages you do not have is a different finding from learning your own pages load slowly.
Then you usually do not beat it head-on, and anyone saying otherwise is selling. The honest plan has two parts. Take the searches a national page answers badly, which normally means anything specific to your town or your exact service. Then decide whether being listed on that directory is worth it, since for some searches the listing is the only slot open to you.
No. The document is yours and it is written to be handed to somebody else. Owners buy the comparison, take it to their own developer or their current agency, and get the gaps closed there. If you would rather we did the work, the same findings become the first few months of the program, month to month.
No, and we would turn the job down. Attacking another business is a poor use of your money and a risk to your own site if it goes sideways. If a rival is genuinely breaking the rules, that tends to catch up with them on its own schedule. Our side of the work is making your pages the better answer to the question.
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Tell us the three companies you think you are losing to, and we will show you the ones the search results actually put above you. Free consult by phone or video, then a flat quote: call or text (407) 694-2055, or email [email protected].
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.