Everybody looks at their competitors. Most people do it badly, and the two common failures are opposite.
One is ignoring them entirely on principle. The other is looking closely and then imitating, which produces a business that is a worse version of somebody else.
The useful version is narrower: you are looking for information about the market, not for things to copy.
Start by picking the right competitors
Not the biggest company in your trade. Not the one that annoys you.
Pick three. One who is roughly your size and clearly doing well. One who is a step ahead of where you want to be in two years. And one who competes on being cheapest, because that one tells you where the floor is and who you are losing on price to.
That third choice is the one people skip and it is the most useful. You cannot decide whether to compete on price without knowing what the price actually is.
What to look at, and what each thing tells you
Their Google Business Profile. Categories, services listed, review count, review recency, photo count. This is the single most informative page and it takes four minutes. Compare their review velocity to yours rather than their total, because a hundred reviews from 2021 tells a different story than thirty from this year.
Their review text, not their rating. Read twenty. What do customers actually praise, in their own words? Punctuality shows up more than craftsmanship in most trades, which is worth knowing. And read the negative ones properly, because a complaint pattern in a competitor's reviews is a description of an unmet need in your market.
Their pricing, if published. Roughly two thirds of homeowners want pricing on a website and only about a third of contractors provide it. If a competitor publishes and you do not, they are answering a question you are leaving open.
Which towns they name. Their service area pages, or the towns mentioned on their site. This tells you where they are actually trying to compete, which is frequently narrower than their stated coverage.
Whether they answer the phone. Call them during working hours. Not to waste their time, just to see what happens. In a market where roughly half of inbound calls to home service businesses never reach a person, this is a genuine competitive fact and it takes ninety seconds to establish.
What they run ads on. If a competitor is bidding on a term consistently over months, it is producing for them. Nobody sustains unprofitable ad spend for long.
The question to ask of everything
Not "should I do this too." Instead: what does this tell me about what customers here care about?
A competitor with forty recent reviews mentioning speed is not telling you to get more reviews. They are telling you that speed is the thing this market notices, which might mean your positioning should lean into it, or that it is thoroughly claimed and you need a different angle.
The move is to read their marketing as evidence about buyers, then decide independently what to do with it.
Why copying reliably fails
Three reasons, and they compound.
You are copying the visible part of an invisible system. A competitor's beautiful website might be producing nothing while their actual work comes from a fifteen year relationship with two builders. You cannot see that, and you would be replicating the decoration rather than the mechanism.
You arrive second at the thing they already own. If they are known for emergency response, becoming the second emergency response company is a losing position. The market already has one and it is not you.
And you inherit decisions made for reasons you do not know. Their pricing reflects their cost base, their crew, and their tolerance for risk. Copying the number without the structure underneath is how businesses end up unprofitable while doing everything the market leader does.
Look for the gap, not the template
The genuinely valuable output of this exercise is a list of things nobody in your market is doing.
All three publish no pricing. None of them have photographs of actual work. Every one of them takes two days to return a call. Nobody serves the town on the eastern edge properly. All of their reviews mention price and none mention tidiness.
Each of those is a position available to you, and it is available precisely because it is not being copied from anyone.
That is the difference between competitive research and imitation. Imitation asks what they are doing so you can do it too. Research asks what they are all doing so you can find what none of them are.
How often, and how long
Twice a year, an hour each time. Any more and you are watching competitors instead of running a business, which is its own well-documented failure.
Write down what you find, because the value is largely in the comparison against last time. Did their review count move. Did they start publishing prices. Did a new company appear in the map pack.
The one thing worth borrowing outright
Format, never substance.
If a competitor structures their estimate in a way that is clearly clearer than yours, structure yours better too. If their booking process is three steps and yours is six, fix yours. That is not copying positioning, it is removing friction, and friction is not anybody's competitive advantage.
Everything else, decide for yourself. The point of looking at competitors is to understand the market they are all operating in, and then to choose a position within it that is genuinely yours.