Competitor analysis is an important part of local SEO for retail stores. By analyzing competitors, retailers can gain valuable insights into their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, which can help them identify opportunities to improve their own local SEO efforts and outrank competitors in local search engine results pages (SERPs).
But, whether you're a retail business owner or a marketing professional working with local retailers, finding and analyzing your competitors efficiently and accurately requires the right tools — tools like Local Falcon.
Local Falcon is an AI-powered local rank tracker that you can use to identify and monitor competitors in local search results anywhere in the world, down to a hyper-local level.
We'll get into more specifics on how Local Falcon can help retailers find and analyze their competition a little later on, but first…
What Does Retail Competitor Analysis Involve?
In general, doing retail competitor analysis for local SEO purposes involves a few main steps and aspects:
- Identifying Competitors
- Analyzing Keywords
- Local Listing Rank Tracking
- Comparing Reviews and Ratings (Sentiment Analysis)
Identifying Competitors
The first step to performing competitive analysis for a retail store is to start by identifying who your main competitors are in your local area. These will be other nearby retail stores selling products similar to yours.
Analyzing Keywords
Next, you should look at the keywords your competitors are targeting in their local SEO efforts. This can give you ideas for new keywords to target or help you identify gaps and opportunities in your keyword strategy.
Local Listing Rank Tracking
Check where your competitors are listed online and how their listings compare to yours. This can include directories (Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, etc.), review sites, and other platforms.
In local SEO, Google Business Profile is still the most dominant online directory and drives the most traffic by a long shot, so this is the most important listing to track your competitors' rankings for.
Comparing Reviews and Ratings (Sentiment Analysis)
Monitoring your competitors' online reviews and ratings, a form of sentiment analysis, is a huge part of doing competitive analysis for a retail business. It can help you understand how the competition is perceived by customers and identify areas where you can improve your own reputation.
Reviews are also a direct ranking factor for Google and other platforms, so finding ways to increase your own number of reviews and improve your average review score can help boost your retail store in local search rankings.
How To Use Local Falcon To Find and Analyze Retail Store Competitors
Now that you have a better idea of what goes into doing competitor analysis for retail stores, let's dive into a few ways Local Falcon can help you do those things.
Using Local Falcon To Identify Retail Competitors
In order to identify a retail store's top competitors using Local Falcon, one option is to "Run a Quick Scan" for one or more keywords that you're targeting.
To do this, just log in to your Local Falcon account, go to "Run a Quick Scan," and choose the retail store from your locations (or add it if you haven't run a scan for it yet).
Then, set the Map Scan Radius and Grid Size to define the area in which you want to identify the store's competitors.
Lastly, enter all the keywords you want to find competitors for. The Suggested Keywords feature makes this easy by suggesting keywords based on your business listing categories and other search terms that people are using to find businesses like yours.
For example, if you're looking for a fashion retailer's competitors, "clothing store" would likely be the top suggested keyword, potentially followed by some more specific ones.
When you're happy with all the Scan Settings, hit "Run Scan" to generate a new Scan Report, which will provide you with your first valuable insights into competitors within the chosen area.
Once the scan is complete, you'll be automatically taken to the Scan Explorer, which is an interactive map showing how your business ranks at each data point in the scanned area. Clicking on any of these points will pull up a list of all competitors found in local search results at that specific point on the map.
If you navigate to the Scan Report next, towards the bottom you'll see a list of all competitors found in the scan, ranked by their average SoLV score (representing how often they show up in the top search results). This list can give you a good idea of who the top competition is overall.
Now, once you've run a scan for a location and keyword and checked out the results in the Scan Explorer and Scan Report, you can then go to "Competitor Reports" and see an even more detailed Competitor Report for the scan.
Local Falcon's Competitor Reports contain a list of all competitors found in the scan, similar to what you see in Scan Reports, but with the addition of an interactive geo-grid map for each competitor.
When you click on any competitor in the list, the scan grid will change to show you exactly how that specific competitor ranks at every grid point on the map. This allows you to see where they are the most competitive, and where you might be able to outrank them most easily.
We recommend running a few different scans and exploring the different ways to identify competitors in the different report types to get an idea of who your retail store's true competitors are.
This will help you start incorporating competitor analysis into your local SEO strategy, so you can start optimizing to outrank competitors in the SERPs and improve your overall visibility.
Using Local Falcon To Analyze Retail Competitors' Keywords
Once you've identified your top local retail competition, it's time to start looking at their keywords to analyze their local SEO strategies and guide yours in the right direction.
Analyzing keywords helps you find the best opportunities to boost your own position, potentially by adding categories and keywords to your listings or optimizing for keywords that are less competitive, for which you may be able to shoot up in the rankings relatively quickly.
For instance, let's say that your clothing retail store only has the "clothing store" category selected for its Google Business Profile listing, and you see in a Scan Report or Competitor Report that your top competitors have additional secondary categories selected, such as "women's clothing store," "men's clothing store," and "fashion accessories store."
As long as your store actually sells those things, you might start optimizing your GBP by adding some of those categories to it to help it rank more competitively in more local search results.
But we haven't even mentioned one of the best ways to get keyword insights in Local Falcon yet — Falcon AI.
Falcon AI analysis is included by default in your Scan Reports, and provides information about what categories and keywords competitors are ranking for, as well as suggestions for how to optimize your listing to compete.
Falcon AI may also suggest additional keywords to run scans for, which can provide even more insights and help you find new terms you can outrank competitors for. For example, for a clothing retail store, it might suggest keywords like "sustainable clothing store" or "environmentally conscious apparel near me."
Using Local Falcon To Track Rankings for Competing Listings
After you know who the top local retail competition is and have some insights into what keywords they're ranking for, you should run regular rank tracking scans to monitor your performance vs that of competitors and see how optimizations you implement are working.
One way to do this is by going to "Scheduled Scans" and setting up recurring Auto Scans. When you create a new Auto Scan, you can select a past scan you've run to use all the same Scan Settings, then simply choose a time and frequency to run the scan and give it a nickname.
Alternatively, if you're doing local SEO for a multi-location retail business, you might set up a Campaign Scan to run simultaneous auto scans for multiple locations using the same Scan Settings.
Whichever method you choose, we typically recommend a bi-weekly frequency for tracking competitors in the local rankings, but you may decide to run auto scans every three or four weeks instead to get more out of your budget.
Keep in mind that local search optimizations usually take anywhere from a few weeks to months to really show themselves in the rankings, so it's important to keep running scans at regular intervals to see how things are working.
Getting new Scan Reports and Competitor Reports every couple of weeks or so also helps you spot things like new competitors entering the market or jumping up in the rankings, so you can adjust your local SEO strategy accordingly.
It's important to remember that doing local SEO for a retail store, or any other business for that matter, is an ongoing process, and getting regular rank tracking reports is an essential part of adapting and staying competitive in local search.
Using Local Falcon To Compare Retail Competitor Reviews and Ratings
The last aspect of doing local SEO competitive analysis for a retail business is to compare your business's reviews and ratings to those of competitors.
Local Falcon makes this easy by showing you each competitor's total number of reviews and average review score in reports, and Falcon AI will point out when a competitor's reviews might be what's causing them to outrank you.
When you know a competitor might be higher up in the rankings because of their reviews and ratings, you can start looking at their reviews and comparing them to yours.
This can help you identify ways to improve your business, ultimately contributing to it getting more positive reviews that can boost its local search rankings and influence customers to choose your business over competitors.
Final Words
Local Falcon is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance any retailer's local SEO strategy by providing valuable insights into competitors' strategies, keywords, and rankings.
Retailers can use Local Falcon to conduct thorough competitor analysis, identify opportunities for improvement, optimize their listings, and ultimately outrank competitors in local search engine results.
By incorporating Local Falcon into their local SEO efforts, retailers can stay ahead of the competition and increase their visibility to potential customers, leading to greater success in the highly competitive local retail market.