Is there an easy way to see how competitive a local search term is?

[jimmyseo]

Is there a quick and easy way to see how competitive local search terms are?  I am looking at helping my clients show up on the local search results.  Some times all I have to do is claim a listing and they move right to the top.  Sometimes I claim a listing and nothing happens so I get links and I get reviews and it takes awhile.  I want to be able to put an accurate price point on the service I am offering.  I have looked at the search volume and it hasn't been the best indicator because some industries are more competitve than others.  Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

[caseyhen]

Hi Kicksetc - it's not quick and easy, but you can do some comparisons that will be helpful.

Basically, you'd want to build an Excel chart (or Google Spreadsheets / OpenOffice) that mimics the metrics that might go into local rankings. For example, see this post talking about all the potential ranking factors and how they correlate - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-seo-lessons-learned-from-rank-correlation-data

You could extract out those data points and compare them against each other for different queries to get a sense of how competitive/hard it might be to rank in the top results on a local/maps/places search.

Sorry there's nothing quick and simple. We're working in the long term to expand our KW Difficulty tool to perform analyses on local/places results, but it's going to be a while before we get there.

Best of luck!

[MarloSchneider]

Casey's answer pretty much nails it, here are a few specific tricks I use to make the process faster though:

Using the moztoolbar do a SERP overlay on the sites for the search term to easily get a feel for the difficulty of competition based on domainrank.

Do a whitespark report to see how many citations the other sites have compared to your site.

Do getlisted.org search on their sites/your sites to get a basic idea of how involved the other sites on the local search are.

Run on page optimization reports for the terms, local and not, to see if you can gain a relevancy advatnage.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi JimmySEO,

Some good responses here. I also thought I'd throw into the mix SEOverflow's competitive analysis toolkit:

http://www.localsearchtoolkit.com/

I think you might find that very helpful.

Cheers!

Miriam

[Gyi]

+1 for mozbar overlay & getlisteg.org

You can also look at your competitors' Google Places and review the "More about this place" section. You should be able to get a good idea of where your competitors are obtaining local citations.

[WhatsApp_Gold_APK]

Thank you Greetings واتساب الذهبي .