Which Google Business Profile metrics matter most in multi-location competitive research?

Sponsored by Semrush, written by Miriam Ellis, edited by Nichola Stott

There are excellent gridded rank trackers like Semrush’s Map Rank Tracker that reveal the competitive landscape for each branch of your multi-location enterprise. Other tools present similar ranking data for Google’s local packs—knowing this information is a first step to understanding where you’ve already succeeded with earning top rankings via your Google Business Profile (GBP) within Google Maps.

But when a rank tracker or your manual search in Google’s local products indicates that you’re being outranked by a competitor, you need to audit a checklist of GBP elements in order to understand which metrics to improve so you can surpass your competition. Today’s column provides this checklist to aid in your research of each business location.

How to compare your Google Business Profile to your competitor’s

Create a spreadsheet with a column for your business location and a column for the top-ranked competitor for a desired search phrase in Google Maps or Google’s local packs. Add a third column to your spreadsheet for notes. 

Record metrics for each of the following Google Business Profile elements which are considered known local ranking factors:

• Business title – Write down the business name exactly as it appears on both GBPs. In the notes section, document whether the competitor has specific keywords in their business name that either identically or closely match one or more of the words in your search phrase.
  
  If you discover that your brand name is holding you back, you may need to consider legally acquiring a DBA (“doing business as” name) that’s more optimized for one or more key search terms.
• Address – Document the address of each entity in the first two columns. In the third column, note whether the competitor’s location is physically closer to the point of search, or whether there’s some other possible geographic advantage at play, such as their branch being inside Google’s mapped border for the city in question while your branch falls outside of it.
  
  In particular industries, like automotive, document whether the competitor is located in a centroid of business, such as an auto row at which consumers can conveniently visit multiple auto dealerships on a single street, while your location is more remote.
  
  Conversely, there are some instances where being too close to competitors who share your GBP categories could be causing you to be filtered out of the automatic zoom level of Google’s mapping product. Note if you’re in the same building or same block as a same-category business, while your competitor isn’t potentially hampered by this scenario.
  
  If you discover that your address is holding you back, you may need to consider a change of location or lower your expectations for ranking potential in a particular geographic region.
• Categories – Use a Chrome extension like GMB Everywhere or GMB Spy to see your competitor’s GBP categories. Record the primary and secondary categories for their business and yours to see if their higher visibility could be due to categories you’re missing for the search phrase in question. You may find you need to edit or re-prioritize your categories.
• URL – Record the link pointing from the GBP to a given page on the website for each entity. Then use your favorite authority research tools to assign values. For example, you can discover both the authority of an overall domain as well as a location landing page using something like Semrush’s authority scores.

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• Because organic authority underpins Google Business Profile rankings, write down whether your competitor’s superior visibility may be supported by having earned higher organic authority. You may discover the need to improve the on-page or technical SEO for your GBP landing page, or earn new or more authoritative links to it, or improve your internal linking practices.
• Hours of operation – Document the open hours for both entities, plus the time you performed your search for the desired search phrase. Local rankings alter significantly based on which businesses are open or closed at any given time. You may discover that an adjustment to your open hours could give you a ranking advantage during times that the competitor is closed.
• Reviews – Document the average star rating, total number of reviews, and review recency for both entities. Note whether your competitor’s metrics indicate that you need to make operational improvements to provide better customer service for higher star ratings, or that more investment in professional reputation management could increase your review volume and the rate at which you’re receiving new reviews.
• Supporting Factors – Depending on the search phrase in question, you may find that any of the following elements are contributing to Google’s understanding of your competitor as a relevant answer:
• Attributes: examples include “women led” or “Latino owned,” if terms like these are part of the search phrase
• Services: for example, including Google-suggested services and custom services
• Products: note whether the competitor is participating in Google Merchant Center
• Menus: note whether the search phrase is present as a menu item
• Review language: note whether the search phrase is being mentioned in the text content of reviews
• Photos: note whether a photo is being surfaced from the competitor’s GBP that matches the search phrase

If any of these supporting factors appear to be prompting Google to highlight a particular aspect of the competitor via a local business justification or other special feature, your business may need to invest more time in adding new fields and elements to the listing for your location. 

There may be additional metrics your organization is particularly interested in tracking competitively, such as share of voice or NPS score. You may want to go deeper on the characteristics of your organic competitors, such as how they’re handling schema on their location landing pages and how this might be impacting Google’s understanding of them in terms of entity SEO. Add any additional fields of inquiry to your spreadsheet.

Practice spam awareness

It’s not at all uncommon for competitive local business audits to turn up both listing spam and review spam. If you discover that a competitor’s GBP is violating the guidelines for representing your business on Google, or that their reviews fall afoul of Google’s prohibited and restricted content guidelines, add an extra column to your spreadsheet to document these types of spam. 

While there’s no guarantee that Google will act on you flagging and reporting violations, successful removal or demotion of spamming competitors can yield outstanding visibility gains for affected locations of your business. 

Act on what you’ve learned

Some local ranking factors, like reviews, are easier to influence than others, like business addresses. You may be able to quickly remedy some areas in which you now know your metrics don’t match those of your top-ranked competitor, but the truth is that others may require lowering your expectations because your company isn’t prepared to re-brand or move locations. 

In general, however, your next step after running this audit is to act on it. This activity typically falls into three categories:

1. If all of your SEO and marketing is handled in-house, you’ll need to create a workflow for improving each of the discovered metrics in-house
2. If you’re working with a third-party SEO or marketing firm, you’ll need to create a joint strategy for accomplishing the necessary work together
3. If you’re in a franchise scenario, the brand will need to ensure that franchisees have appropriate access permissions to optimize their own GBPs

In each of the three scenarios, you should:

1. Record historic ranking data from the date you conducted the audit
2. Record the date on which you begin working to improve your metrics
3. Set a benchmark date on which you’ll re-conduct your search and re-measure your ranking for the desired phrase
4. Record your ranking on that benchmark date to see if the work you’ve put in has resulted in upward ranking movement
5. If you see no ranking improvement on the benchmark date, assess whether more time should be allotted to get a more accurate measure. While some GBP edits and improvements (like adding a new item to a menu or changing your hours of operation) can have a fairly immediate impact on rankings, others (like building up your page authority score) could take weeks or months to be fully remarked by Google and begin impacting your Maps or local pack rankings.

Realistically address the problem of scale

Though local business competitive audit tools are continuously improving, I have yet to see a single product that provides the entirety of what I need to know about local competitors at scale.

The truth is that your enterprise is likely to need to use a variety of tools and software to access the data you need across hundreds or thousands of locations and search phrases. I’m confident that advances in automation will address pain points in this scenario in time, but for now, a key to scaling the local competitive audit process is prioritization.

Using your current favorite tools and software, your enterprise should identify two key branch buckets: 

1. Your worst-performing locations for target search phrases
2. The locations you need to perform best for target search phrases

These two buckets may contain completely different branches of the business. For example, bucket 1 might contain some businesses that have suffered severe reputation damage due to a recent problem like an outbreak of a food-borne illness. Your brand could decide that a new campaign needs to be put in place for organizational safety improvements at these locations, with the understanding that ranking improvements tied to review metrics are a longer-range goal because it’ll take time for the public to trust the branches in these regions again. 

Meanwhile, bucket 2 might largely be made up of your locations in the most affluent communities you serve, because you know the potential for profits is highest in these locales. The contents of the buckets will be different for each enterprise, but the overall goal is to arrive at a manageable batch of locations you can audit, optimize, and measure improvements for, based on priority. 

Realistically address the problem of moving goal posts

So much work is involved in conducting competitive research for multi-location brands that it can be tempting to see this activity as one-and-done. However, it’s vital for enterprises to understand that Google’s local results are in a permanent, constant state of flux. Rankings demonstrably change, not just from user to user, but from hour to hour. 

New competitors appear in your market. Old competitors make new marketing investments. Some competitors close doors. Every change in the offline local commercial landscapes presents an altered scenario of challenges and opportunities for your locations in that region.

Because the goal posts are constantly moving, local business competitive audits should be viewed as a recurring event on your marketing calendar. Depending on the number of your locations and the resources of your enterprise, a workable schedule should be created for re-auditing all branches on an ongoing basis. The quality of your software and tools will dictate the ease or hardship of this process, but the investment is almost always worth it.

Identifying opportunities for improvement and accomplishing the necessary work to meet goals ties in directly to branch profitability and brand health. And, in fact, the practice of conducting regular audits can become a competitive-difference-maker in itself, in markets where your competitors are less motivated or dozing. 

With an attitude of dedication to noticing the finer details of Google Business Profiles, upward movement is typically achievable once you understand your competitive landscape.