The rivals winning your area
You almost certainly know who your competitors are. The trouble is that the homeowner does not see the ones you would name. They see you beside two or three names a search engine put there, and in most markets at least one of them is a company the owner has never heard of.
How much this weighs when I read a company the way a homeowner does: 12 out of 100.
What gets read
- Who is actually shown beside you for the searches that matter
- How their reputation compares on the things a homeowner weighs
- What they are doing that is visible to a homeowner and invisible to you
- Where the real gap is, as opposed to where it feels like it is
What owners ask me about this
- Who are my real competitors online?
- Not necessarily the firms you meet at suppliers or bid against on tenders. Your online competition is whoever appears next to you when a homeowner searches, which is decided by search engines and not by reputation in the trade. Established owners are regularly surprised here, and it is usually the most useful surprise in the whole exercise.
- Why do I keep losing to a smaller outfit?
- Because that firm is not winning on the work. It is winning before the work is ever discussed. If it has more recent reviews, a fuller listing and answers its phone, it has satisfied the homeowner on everything that can be checked in two minutes from a sofa. Your twenty years cannot be checked in two minutes. That is not a quality problem. It is an evidence problem.
- Should I be watching what they do?
- Watching, yes. Copying, no. What is worth knowing is which specific things they are doing that a homeowner can see and you are not doing, because that is the part you can close. What is not worth doing is matching them move for move, which turns your marketing into a reaction to somebody whose business you do not understand.
Everything above is the general case. Yours has names in it.
From here I can't see where you stand on this, or which rival is ahead. Chalkline Reports reads your own company the way a homeowner does.