How Home Services Businesses Can Outrank Competitors with Strategic Analysis:
- Uncover What Competitors Are Doing—And Do It Better
A routine competitor analysis helps HVAC, remodeling, and siding companies understand local competitors’ strengths, pricing, and marketing tactics. Use these insights to improve your own marketing strategy and fill overlooked gaps in the market. - Follow a Step-by-Step Framework to Analyze and Optimize
From identifying direct and indirect competitors to conducting keyword and SWOT analyses, this post outlines a clear process to evaluate competitors and position your business for local visibility and lead generation. - Turn Competitive Insights Into Action With the Right Tools
Use an all-in-one marketing platform like Surefire Local to implement improvements in SEO, content, paid ads, and online reputation—ensuring your business ranks higher and outperforms the competition in your service area.
For home services businesses, such as HVAC companies, remodelers, and windows and siding companies, your target market has a strong geographic focus. That focus can lead to highly competitive markets, with multiple companies seeking the patronage of a select group of customers. How can you make sure that your company is the one that stands out? The key is to perform routine competitor analysis for contractors and home services companies to see what your competition is doing well and how you can improve to do even better.
Defining Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is the process of finding and studying your competitors to see what they’re doing well in their online marketing efforts and what they are not. After answering these questions, you will compare them to your own marketing efforts. These comparisons show you where you need to improve to reach the people who need your services.
Types of Competitors
When analyzing your competition, you’ll need to look at two types of competitors:
- Direct competitors: These businesses offer the same home service you offer to the same geographic demographic.
- Indirect competitors: These businesses offer the same home service you offer, but to a different target market.
Both types of competitors can give you invaluable insight into home services marketing best practices to help you move forward and find new clients.
Components of a Good Competitor Analysis
As you perform a competitor analysis, you will need to have specific components for it to be effective. Using a competitor analysis template can help, but in general, you will want to have the following:
- Identify the competitor – Name the competitor you’re analyzing.
- Analyze the product or service – What home services do they offer? List them all, then compare them to what you offer.
- Compare the pricing – Compare your pricing with your competitor’s. Are you higher or lower? Is there a reason, such as a better or inferior product, or is it just a difference in pricing?
- Look at marketing techniques – See what the other company is doing to market their products, and compare that to your marketing efforts. Where do they rank on Google? What keywords that you’re targeting do they also rank well for?
- Analyze social media messaging – Finally, look at the competition’s social media, considering what they’re doing well and what they could improve, then compare that to your own.
When to Perform a Competitive Analysis
There are times in the normal growth cycle of a home services business when performing a competitive analysis makes sense. For example, if you’re looking to launch a new product offering, you’ll want to perform a home services competitor analysis for that particular service. If you’re hoping to branch into a new demographic area, you need a competitor analysis for contractors in that area to see what they’re offering and how they’re reaching their customers.
You’ll also want to perform a competitor analysis if you’re noticing a drop in new contracts. This drop could indicate a new competitor or a newly effective competitor.
How to Perform a Market Analysis Step-by-Step
Understanding what a competitive analysis is does not help you know how to gather and analyze this documentation. These steps will walk you through the process.
Step 1: Find Your Competition
First, find your competition. The best way to do this is to visit Google and search for your service in your area. See who the first three companies are. Search for various services you provide until you find your best direct competition. Then, search for these services with a different geographic modifier to find indirect competition. Make a list, and determine which one you want to analyze first.
Step 2: Perform Market Research
Now, you’re ready to start researching. You can have someone call the company and pose as a customer to see how they interact with leads. You can explore their website and social media pages to see what they’re doing. You can even interview past customers to see what they liked and disliked about the services performed. Keep detailed notes from all of this data to add to your competitive analysis.
Step 3: Perform Marketing Research
This step is where you get into the details of their marketing and see what they are doing. While you can’t see the company’s marketing plan, you can see its results. Take some time to study its various online properties, including:
- Website
- Social media pages
- YouTube page
- Paid ads
- Press releases
Take detailed notes of these online properties when you find them. Can you determine a consistent brand message across these various channels? If so, what is it? Can you determine a voice or a mission? Write that down as well. See if you can determine what value messaging they are providing to their customers, and decide if they are presenting that message clearly or if the message gets muddled and lost. Then, use the data you collect to create your own home services online marketing plan that avoids the mistakes your competition makes or exceeds the competition in clarity and focus.
Step 4: Perform Keyword Analysis
Another step to take in analyzing your competition is to perform competitor keyword research. Once you’ve found your competitors, plug their websites into SEO tools to determine the keywords they’re targeting. Then, perform basic keyword research to see what keywords have the most competition. You want to avoid high-competition keywords and focus your effort on high-value but low-competition keywords. Knowing the keywords your competitors already target will help with this.
Step 5: SWOT Analysis
Now, you’re ready to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your competitor. This study is known as a SWOT analysis. This data will help you avoid the mistakes your competitors are making while also helping you find opportunities to step into the market and grab clients the competition is ignoring. You can also perform your own SWOT analysis to determine any threats coming from the competitor you’re analyzing.
Step 6: Find Your Position
Now that you have the data from the previous steps, see where you fit in the marketplace. Are you one of the top options for people seeking home services help, or are you falling far behind your competition? If the answer is no, look at the data you’ve gathered to see where you can make changes and improve your online marketing efforts to make yourself more competitive.
Finding a Market Advantage
While your competitive analysis will give you important insight into your competition, it will also give you insight into your own work. Use this insight to figure out where your advantage in your market may be.
For example, if you find that your competitors are ignoring a particular home service that you provide, you can market that heavily to draw in new clientele. That clientele may eventually need additional home services, and they may turn to you instead of your competition since they’re already a customer.
You may also find a market gap. Perhaps your competitor is completely ignoring marketing to one particular area of your county. You can hit that area heavily and draw in new customers from it before they realize their mistake and start building a presence there.
Make Your Marketing More Effective with the Right Marketing Platform
Once you’ve performed a competitor analysis, take note of areas where you need to improve your own marketing efforts to surpass your competitors. Then, use a marketing platform to streamline these changes. Surefire Local, for example, places your content marketing, pay-per-click campaigns, local SEO, and online reputation management tools all in one place so you can quickly see what’s working and make necessary changes and updates from the same back office.
Competitor analysis is a constant process. To stay competitive, you need to regularly check on what your competition is doing and make appropriate changes to your own marketing efforts. If you put in the time for these tasks, you will find yourself outshining the competition through better social media marketing, improved local SEO results, and a more professional online presence.
Surefire Local is a tool that assists with this process. Attend a demo to learn more about the robust features of our all-in-one marketing platform.