Reading your competitors and their ads

The monthly watch sheet from chapter 8 already records who is first for each seed, with a rough review count. It is easy to stop there and go back to your own profile. The names on that sheet are the beginning of a second piece of work: reading those businesses closely enough to understand the contest you are in.

The purpose is to learn what customers in your area respond to and where the leader has left something undone. Neither can be learned from your own profile alone, and neither requires copying anyone.

What to read on a profile

Keep one page per seed and read the same things each month, so the notes can be compared. A sentence under each heading is enough.

Categories and services. Which category is primary, which are additional, and how many services are listed. A leader with a precise category and a full services list is telling you how it wants to be understood. A leader with a broad category and three services may be winning on something else, such as reviews or distance.

Description. Read it as a customer would, and note what it promises and what it leaves out. A description that is one paragraph about the history of the business says little about what happens on a visit.

Review topics. On Google Maps, many profiles show the topics that come up most often in reviews. Those topics are the words customers use for what they value: the waiting time, a particular job, a person at the counter. Write them down. They are better material for your own services list and page than any phrase you would invent.

Photos and posts. How many photos, of what, and how recently. When the last post went up. A leader who posted last month is running a different kind of operation from one that has not posted in a long time.

Replies. Whether reviews get answers, how quickly, and in what tone. A business that answers every critical review in public is showing you that the complaint is read by more people than the person who wrote it.

Do the reading on the same day as the monthly watch, from the same phone if you can, so that the notes and the rankings describe the same week. Write what you see in your own words. The notes are for comparing months, not for producing a report for anyone else.

Where the leader is thin

A business can be strong in reviews and still be thin in places that matter for your seed. The usual gaps are visible from the outside.

• The service is offered but not listed, so the profile does not answer the search in so many words.
• The photos are all of the storefront or the waiting room, with none of the work.
• The reviews mention a service the services list leaves out.
• The description says little about what a visit involves, how long it takes or how to book.
• Questions in reviews about price, parking or timing go unanswered.

An illustration, not a recommendation for any real business. A jeweler in Sheepshead Bay is watching ring resizing in Sheepshead Bay. The first place has a long review history and a full services list. Its photos show the shop window, the counter and a display case. None shows a ring before and after resizing. Its reviews mention resizing often, and the services list names it once, without a description. The review history and the services list are strong. The profile is thin on the part of the experience a person considering a resizing would want to see.

That gap is a reason to make sure your own seed page shows the work and explains the job. It is not a reason to assume the place will change hands. The leader may be first for reasons that have nothing to do with the page, including distance and years of trade.

Keep the gaps in proportion. A thin spot at a leader is useful when it matches something you can fix in an afternoon, such as a missing service description or a set of photos that never shows the work. A gap that would take years to close, such as a review count, belongs in the slow column and not in this month's plan. The notes are there to separate the two.

A first place with a thin services list is a gap you can see from the outside.

Ads as a signal

What a business pays to promote is evidence of what it finds worth paying for. Facebook and Instagram ads are visible to anyone in Meta's public ad library, and Google search ads appear on the results page, marked as sponsored. You do not need an account to look, and you do not need to guess at a budget. The library shows which ads a page is running, not what they cost.

Our measurements in South Brooklyn suggest that paid advertising in local trades is thinner than owners often assume. Among 100 local med spa pages, 12 run Meta ads, with 84 active ads in total. Google search ads appeared in none of 39 local med spa searches, and the likely reason is platform policy: Google restricts ads promoting prescription drugs such as Botox. Among 83 local jeweler pages, 5 run Meta ads, with 43 ads in all, most of them from one large online watch seller. Only 4 of 39 local jeweler searches showed a paid result, mostly from national online sellers and refiners. The method page describes how these measurements are made.

Two readings follow. The absence of ads on your seed does not mean the search is worthless. It often means the local businesses in the trade have chosen not to pay for it, which leaves the map as the main route to the customer. And where ads do appear, they show which services someone considers worth buying attention for. A gold buyer pays to reach people searching cash for gold, because one seller can be worth a lot. That is trade information, and it is free.

When you look at an ad, read three things: the service it names, the words it uses, and where it sends the click. A local competitor advertising a service is telling you the service has enough demand to support a budget. A national seller advertising in your area is telling you that the search attracts buyers from outside the neighborhood, and that your own advantage is the door and the counter.

Ads change faster than profiles, so treat a sighting as a reading of this month. Look again on the next round. A competitor who advertised a service last month and stopped is telling you something different from one who has kept the same ad running, and the ad library and the results page will show you which is which.

The same service points at different rivals

Chapter 4 showed that different searches put you against different businesses. For a jeweler, ring resizing is mostly a contest among jewelers, while watch repair belongs to watch shops and ear piercing to piercing studios and accessory chains. A med spa offering laser hair removal competes with studios built around that one service.

So the reading work is per seed. The question on each seed card is who is first for this service, in this neighborhood, and what kind of business that is. The biggest jewelry store nearby may not be first for the service you are working on. A watch shop that leads watch repair will have a different services list, a different photo set and different review topics from a jeweler who leads ring resizing, and the lessons from each are different.

What owners get wrong

Copying wording. A competitor's description belongs to them, and copying it gives a customer two identical profiles to choose between. Use the topics from reviews and your own customers' words instead.

Obsessing over the head-term leader. The business first for jewelry store is not necessarily first for your seed, and its profile says little about ring resizing.

Reading one profile once. A snapshot tells you what a profile looks like, not how often it is tended. Read the same businesses each month.

Assuming competitors advertise everywhere. In our area, most local pages in both trades run no Meta ads, and most local searches show no paid result. The absence is common enough that it changes the picture an owner carries around.

The competitor page is small on purpose. Five seeds, one leader each, the same headings every month. In a few months it will tell you which rivals are active and which are coasting, and what the reviews in your seeds say customers value.