How to audit your competitor's website in 20 minutes (free tools only)

Before you invest in your own site, it's worth understanding what your local competition looks like online. In most trade markets, the bar is low. Here's a 20-minute audit using three free tools that tells you exactly what's happening.

Tool 1: Google Search Console's Rich Results + your own search

Open an incognito window in Chrome (Ctrl+Shift+N / Cmd+Shift+N) — this removes your browsing history from the results. Search "[your trade] [your city]." What you're looking for:

1. Who is in the local map pack (the 3-result block with stars and a map)? These are your GBP competitors.
2. Who is in the organic results below the map pack? These are your website SEO competitors.
3. What are their titles and meta descriptions? Does their snippet tell you specifically what they do and where? Or is it generic?
4. How many Google reviews do they have? A competitor with 200 reviews at 4.8 stars is a different challenge than one with 12 reviews.

This gives you the field layout. Write down the top 2-3 competitors who appear consistently.

Tool 2: PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev)

Take each competitor's URL and run it through Google PageSpeed Insights. Select the mobile tab. You're looking for:

1. Their mobile performance score. If it's under 50, their site is slow — a performance win you can capture with a fast-loading site.
2. First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint. Numbers over 3 seconds mean they're losing mobile visitors constantly.
3. Whether they have Core Web Vitals issues (marked in the report). These directly affect their Google ranking.

In most trade markets, you'll find at least 1-2 of your top competitors have mobile scores under 40. That's a massive gap you can exploit by simply having a faster site.

Tool 3: Chrome DevTools for mobile simulation

Right-click on a competitor's site, click "Inspect," click the mobile device icon at the top of the panel. This shows you their site as it appears on a phone. What to look for:

1. Is there a tappable phone number visible without scrolling?
2. Is the text readable at 16px+ without zooming?
3. Is there a call-to-action visible in the first screenful?
4. Does the layout break at mobile widths, or does it adapt cleanly?

Most contractor sites fail 2-3 of these tests when viewed in mobile simulation. Every failure is a lead they're losing — and a lead your better-built site will capture instead.

What to do with what you find

If your competitors have weak mobile performance, slow load times, and no visible call-to-action on mobile: the bar to outrank them is low. A properly built mobile-first site with real local SEO will rank above them in 3-6 months. The competition isn't doing anything you can't out-execute with the basics done right.

If one competitor has a genuinely strong site — fast, mobile-first, 150+ reviews, well-written content — that's a harder target. You can still compete, but expect a longer timeline and focus on the things they might have missed (neighborhood-specific pages, schema markup, GBP completeness).

In either case, the audit tells you where to aim first. Start where the gap is biggest.