Ask any business owner who their competitors are and you'll get an answer in seconds. Ask what those competitors charge, which searches bring them customers or which ads they've been running since June, and the answers get a lot vaguer.
A competitive analysis is how you get those answers. The basic version costs you nothing except a few hours. With free tools, three to five competitors take an afternoon, roughly 4 to 6 hours. If you want a rival's full keyword and backlink data, paid tools start at about ₹2,800 a month and go past ₹13,000 once you add features.
In this guide, we explain what competitive analysis is, how to do one step by step, which tools are worth using, and a template you can copy for your own business.
What Is Competitive Analysis?
Short answerCompetitive analysis means studying the businesses you compete with (what they sell, what they charge, how they find customers and where they fall short) so you can make better decisions about your own.
You'll also see it called competitor analysis or competitor research. They mean the same thing.
For a beginner, a useful competitive analysis answers a few plain questions:
- Who are my real competitors, online and offline?
- What do they charge, and what does the customer get for that price?
- Why do customers pick them over me, or me over them?
- Where do their customers come from: Google, ads, Instagram, marketplaces or word of mouth?
- What are they bad at that I could do better?
A spreadsheet and a few honest hours will answer most of these. Frameworks like SWOT come in later, once you have the facts in front of you.
How much work it takes depends on where your business is today.
| Business stage | Time it takes | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Planning a new business | 3 to 5 hours | Who already sells it near you, their prices, their Google reviews |
| Small business with a website | 1 to 2 days the first time, then about 2 hours a month | All of the above, plus their keywords, website, content and social media |
| Business running paid ads | Half a day every month | All of the above, plus their ads, offers, landing pages and backlinks |
Business size matters less here than you'd think. What matters is how many places you sell. If you only sell from a shop, you can skip the SEO and ads steps below. If you sell through a website, Amazon and Instagram, you'll need all eight.
When Should You Do a Competitive Analysis?
Do one before you start anything new, then again whenever something changes. These moments should always send you back to it:
- Before you launch a business, or while you're choosing between two business ideas.
- Before you set or change your prices.
- When enquiries or Google rankings drop and you can't find the reason on your own side.
- When a new competitor opens nearby or starts showing up in your search results.
- Before a website redesign, so the new site fixes what competitors already do better.
- When you plan a Google Ads or Meta ads budget.
- Once a quarter anyway, even when nothing seems wrong.
Big companies do this constantly, and you can watch it happen in your food delivery app. Swiggy added a ₹2 platform fee to every order in April 2023. Zomato brought in its own platform fee a few months later, and the two have tracked each other's fee ever since. In March 2026, about a week after Zomato raised its fee, Swiggy raised its own to ₹17.58 an order, which put the two at almost the same price once GST is counted.
The small-business version takes about ten minutes. Every few months, check what your nearest three competitors charge. Otherwise the first person to tell you you're too expensive will be a customer on their way out.
The 4 Types of Competitors
Most beginners only list their direct competitors. There are usually four kinds worth tracking, and the fourth is the one people miss. To make this concrete, say you run a home bakery in Jaipur that takes custom cake orders on WhatsApp.
Direct competitors
Sell the same thing to the same people.
For the bakeryOther cake shops and home bakers who deliver in your part of Jaipur.
WatchPrices, flavours, delivery times and reviews.
Indirect competitors
Sell something different that meets the same need.
For the bakeryDessert brands on Swiggy and Zomato, and the mithai shop in the local market.
WatchThe occasions when customers choose them over a cake, like Diwali or a small family get-together.
Replacement competitors
The customer does it themselves, or goes without.
For the bakeryA YouTube cake recipe, or a packaged cake from the supermarket.
WatchWhat would make someone pay you instead.
Search competitors
Whoever ranks on Google for your keywords, even if they don't sell what you sell.
For the bakeryJustdial listings, food blogs and recipe sites that show up for "custom cake in Jaipur".
WatchWhich pages rank, and what they give the searcher.
Search competitors catch a lot of people out. We see this with clients all the time: the business they think is their biggest rival isn't the one beating them on Google. A directory, a blog or a company from another city often holds the top spot instead. If you want customers from SEO, those pages belong on your list too.
How to Do a Competitive Analysis in 8 Steps
Each step takes between 20 minutes and an hour per competitor. Start with three competitors. You can add more once the process feels easy.
Make a short list of competitors
Pick three to five direct competitors and one or two indirect ones. Go much beyond that on your first try and you'll probably give up halfway.
Places to find them:
- Google your main service plus your city ("interior designer in Jaipur") and note who appears in the map results and on page one.
- On Google Maps, look for businesses near you with the most reviews.
- Check Justdial, IndiaMART or whichever marketplace your customers use.
- Ask your last ten customers who else they looked at. You won't get a more honest list.
NoteDon't put the biggest brand in your industry on the list just because it's famous. If a customer would never choose between you and them, they aren't your competitor yet.
Study what they sell and what they charge
Go through each competitor's website, price list and offers as if you were a customer. Where prices aren't listed, ask for a quote on WhatsApp or by phone. This is called mystery shopping, and it's normal practice.
Write down:
- The price range for their main product or service
- What's included, and what costs extra
- Delivery charges, payment options and EMI
- Guarantees, refunds or free trials
- How fast they reply, and how they treat you when you ask questions
That last point is often where a smaller business wins. A large competitor can cut its prices in a week, but it usually can't answer every WhatsApp message within a few minutes.
Look at their website
Open each competitor's site on your phone, because that's how most of your customers will see it. Then check:
- How fast it loads. Google's free PageSpeed Insights gives a score out of 100.
- How many taps it takes to call, send a WhatsApp message or ask for a quote.
- Whether prices, location and opening hours are easy to find.
- Trust signals like reviews, client logos, photos of real work and a full address.
If every competitor's site is slow and out of date, that's an opening for you. A fast, clear business website can win enquiries on its own when the other options are hard to use.
Find the keywords they rank for
This is the SEO part of competitive analysis, and it's where most of the useful data comes from. You want to know which searches bring customers to your competitors, so you can go after the same ones, or the ones they've missed.
With free tools
Search your main keywords on Google in an incognito window and note who ranks in the top 10. Google Keyword Planner shows how often each keyword is searched, and if you enter a competitor's web address it suggests keywords related to their site. Ubersuggest's free version allows 3 searches a day, which is enough for a short list.
With paid tools
Semrush, Ahrefs and paid Ubersuggest show the keywords a competitor ranks for, their position for each one and an estimate of the traffic. The most useful report is the keyword gap: searches where two or three of your competitors rank and you don't. That list is often your next few months of content.
Look at what kind of page ranks, too. If the top results for website development cost in India are all price guides, a service page won't rank there however well it's written. Match the type of page Google is already showing.
NoteTraffic numbers in these tools are estimates, and they can be well off for small websites. Use them to compare competitors with each other, not as exact figures.
Check their content and backlinks
Look at what each competitor publishes: blog posts, guides, videos, case studies. Note which topics they cover, how detailed their pages are and how often they post something new. Paid tools also list their top pages by traffic. If a competitor's best page is a price guide and you don't have one, you've found your next page to write.
Backlinks are links from other websites to theirs, and Google still treats them as an important sign of trust. They matter more than most beginners expect. When Ahrefs studied about 14 billion pages in 2023, it found that 96.55% got no traffic from Google at all, and having no backlinks was one of the main reasons it gave.
Ahrefs' free Backlink Checker shows the top 100 links to any website, and Semrush's free account shows part of the list too. Look for websites that link to two or more of your competitors but not to you: local directories, trade associations, news sites, suppliers. Those are usually the easiest links to win first.
Watch their ads
Two free tools show you almost every ad a competitor is running. Most small business owners have never opened either of them.
- Meta Ad Library: search any business's Facebook page and see every ad it's running on Facebook and Instagram right now, with the date each one started.
- Google Ads Transparency Center: search a company name or website to see the ads it runs on Google Search, YouTube and other Google sites.
Pay attention to how long each ad has been live. Businesses rarely keep paying for an ad that brings in nothing, so an ad that has run for three months or more is usually working for them. Note the offer, the headline and the page it sends people to. Do this before you set your own Google Ads budget, and you'll know what you're bidding against.
From our client work · iProductRepair, Bangalore
In September 2026 we ran this check for iProductRepair, an independent Apple repair shop in Bangalore. The Meta Ad Library showed 195 active ads in India for "macbook repair" and 72 for "apple repair bangalore". Most of the Bangalore ones came from two repair shops. One led with MacBook battery offers, and the other ran a separate ad for every single repair.
The surprise was who wasn't there. The three shops that hold Google's map results for MacBook repair in Bangalore weren't running a single Meta ad. We also found that Google Ads doesn't allow ads for hardware repair from third-party providers, so search ads were never an option for this client. The plan we built uses click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook and Instagram, where the map leaders aren't competing at all.
Read their reviews and social media
Open each competitor's Google Business Profile and read the 1, 2 and 3 star reviews first. Customers will tell you exactly what that business gets wrong: late delivery, hidden charges, no reply after payment. Each complaint is a promise you can make and keep. In my experience, it's the most useful half hour of the whole exercise.
While you're on their profile, look at the details too: the main category, the number of photos, how often they post and whether they reply to reviews. Those details decide a lot of who shows up in the map results.
From our client work · CBLM Holy Family Hospital, Jaipur
I did this for CBLM Holy Family Hospital in late September 2026, searching "hair transplant in Jaipur" on Google Maps the way a patient would. The clinics in the top three had between 1,600 and 2,400 reviews each, and Google listed them as hair transplant clinics. The hospital had a 4.8 rating from 117 reviews, which is a good score. But its profile only had Hospital and Dermatologist as categories, so nothing in it told Google this was a place for hair transplants.
We added Hair transplantation clinic, Surgeon and a few more categories on 30 September. It's too early to share results, and a gap of more than a thousand reviews will take a lot longer to close. Honestly, we'd spent weeks on the hospital's website by then. Ten minutes on the map results showed a bigger problem than anything on the site.
On Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, note how often they post, which posts get real comments and whether anyone from the business replies. A big follower count with ten likes a post often means bought followers or a tired audience. If they post every week and you haven't posted since last Diwali, social media is probably the easiest gap to close.
Turn what you found into a plan
Sort your notes into a simple SWOT: your strengths and weaknesses next to these competitors, the opportunities they've left open, and the threats they pose to you. Then pick no more than three things to act on in the next 90 days. For example:
- None of your competitors shows prices online. Publish a simple price guide.
- Your nearest rival has 140 Google reviews and you have 12, so start asking happy customers for one after every order.
- Fix your mobile site speed before you spend more on ads.
- Write the guide that answers the question all three competitors skip.
Then put a date in your calendar for the next check, three months from now.
Competitive Analysis Template (Copy This)
Copy this table into Google Sheets or Excel and add one column for each competitor, plus one for your own business. The last column shows sample entries for the Jaipur home bakery, so you can see how much detail is useful.
| What to check | Where to find it | Sample entry |
|---|---|---|
| Main products or services | Website, menu, catalogue | Custom cakes, cupcakes, brownies |
| Price range | Website, WhatsApp quote | ₹650 to ₹1,100 per kg for custom cakes |
| Included or extra | Quote, checkout page | Delivery ₹80 extra, fondant toppers charged separately |
| Google rating and reviews | Google Maps | 4.6 stars from 212 reviews |
| Most common complaint | 1 to 3 star reviews | Late delivery on weekends |
| Website speed on mobile | PageSpeed Insights | 38 out of 100 |
| Top keywords | Ubersuggest, Semrush or Ahrefs | "birthday cake delivery jaipur", "eggless cake jaipur" |
| Ads running | Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center | 2 Instagram ads, the oldest running since June |
| Social media | Instagram, Facebook | Posts 4 times a week, reels get the most comments |
| Where they're weak | Everything above | No price list online, slow WhatsApp replies |
| What we'll do about it | Your decision | Publish prices, promise a reply within 15 minutes |
Be as strict with your own column as you are with theirs. It's very easy to give yourself 4.5 stars.
Free and Paid Competitive Analysis Tools
You can do a solid first analysis with free tools alone. Paid tools save time and show data you can't get any other way, mainly a competitor's full keyword list and backlinks.
| Tool | Good for | Free version | Paid from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search and Maps | Who ranks, ratings, reviews | Free | Not needed |
| Google Keyword Planner | Search volumes, keyword ideas from a competitor's site | Free with a Google Ads account | Not needed |
| PageSpeed Insights | Website speed on mobile and desktop | Free | Not needed |
| Meta Ad Library | Every live Facebook and Instagram ad | Free | Not needed |
| Google Ads Transparency Center | Google Search, YouTube and display ads | Free | Not needed |
| Ubersuggest | Keywords, top pages, basic backlinks | 3 searches a day | About $29 (₹2,800) a month |
| Ahrefs | Backlinks, keyword gap, top pages | Backlink Checker, top 100 links | $29 (₹2,800) a month for Starter, $129 (₹12,400) for Lite |
| Semrush | Keyword gap, competitor ads, traffic estimates | 10 reports a day | $139 (₹13,300) a month |
Paid prices are from each company's pricing page in September 2026, billed monthly and converted at about ₹96 to the dollar. They're charged in dollars, so the rupee cost moves with the exchange rate. Most give a discount if you pay for a year.
If you're analysing just one business, one month of a paid tool is often enough. Do the full analysis that month, export what you need, then cancel.
Do It Yourself or Hire Help?
Most small businesses should do their first competitive analysis themselves. You know your customers and your market better than any outsider, and the free tools above go a long way.
Bringing in professionals starts to make sense when:
- You spend real money on Google or Meta ads every month and want to know exactly where competitors are beating you.
- You sell in several cities or across India, so the list runs to 10 or 20 competitors.
- You need keyword and backlink gap data across hundreds of pages, which takes paid tools and practice to read well.
- You're about to launch or rebuild a website and want the findings built in from day one.
When a new SEO client comes to us, competitor research is the first job we do, before we change a single page on their site. If you want to know what that kind of work costs, our guide to SEO cost in India lays out the prices, or you can talk to our SEO services team about your market.
Common Mistakes Beginners Make
- Copying the market leader. They can afford a lot that you can't, from big ad budgets to free delivery on everything. Look for what they do badly instead.
- Looking only at price. Plenty of customers will pay a bit more to a business that picks up the phone.
- Mixing up business rivals and search rivals. The shop across the road and the site on Google's first page are often two different businesses, and you need to keep an eye on both.
- Treating tool numbers as facts. SEO tools estimate, and for small local searches they're often wrong. For iProductRepair, Ubersuggest showed no search volume at all for "iphone repair bangalore", while Google Search Console showed the shop's own site had appeared for that exact search 72 times in 90 days. Compare competitors inside one tool, and check your own Search Console before you trust any number.
- Doing it once. Competitors change prices, launch offers and rebuild their websites. Last year's spreadsheet won't show any of that.
- Collecting everything and changing nothing. A 40-tab spreadsheet that nobody opens again is the most common way this goes wrong.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is competitive analysis in simple words?
It's studying the businesses you compete with to understand what they sell, what they charge, how they find customers and where they're weak. You then use what you learn to improve your own prices, marketing and service.
How do you do a competitive analysis step by step?
List 3 to 5 competitors, study their offer and prices, check their website, find their keywords, look at their content and backlinks, watch their ads, and read their reviews and social media. Finish by sorting it into a SWOT and picking up to 3 actions for the next 90 days.
What are the 4 types of competitors?
Direct competitors sell the same thing to the same customers. Indirect competitors sell something different that meets the same need. Replacement competitors are the customer doing it themselves or going without. Search competitors are whoever ranks on Google for your keywords.
What is the difference between competitive analysis and market research?
Market research studies customers and the market as a whole, such as its size, demand and buying habits. Competitive analysis looks at the other businesses in that market. Most business plans need both.
Is SWOT analysis the same as competitive analysis?
No. Competitive analysis is the research itself. SWOT is a simple way to sort what you found into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Most people finish a competitive analysis with a SWOT.
How often should you do a competitive analysis?
Do a full one once a year and a quick check every 3 months. Do an extra one whenever sales or rankings drop, a new competitor appears or you plan to change your prices.
What are the best free competitor analysis tools?
Google Search and Maps, Google Keyword Planner, PageSpeed Insights, Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Center are all free. Ubersuggest and Semrush have limited free versions, with 3 searches and 10 reports a day.
How long does a competitive analysis take?
A first analysis of 3 competitors takes about 4 to 6 hours with free tools. A fuller one that covers keywords, backlinks and ads takes 1 to 2 days the first time, then about 2 hours a month to keep up to date.
