Contents

How to Find Company Competitors

Published on October 16, 2023by Botster

Contents

Frankly speaking, it can be tough trying to identify your competitors when you don’t know how to find the competitors of a company online. And if you have no background in digital marketing, it can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack when you don’t even know where the haystack is.

But guess what? I've got some cool tricks up my sleeves that will make it super easy for you, and I’m going to share them all with you. In the next few moments you’ll be spending with me, I will show you how to find your business competitors as well as some amazing automation tools that will help you find them without all the stress and hard work.

In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn:

How to find the competitors of a company on Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube and Booking.com
Which fast and easy-to-use automation tools can help make your competitor research faster
Ways to use what you learn to make your own business better.

So, how can a company find its way out of a market characterized by pure competition? Your answer is here! By the end of this article, you'll be a pro at finding out who your business rivals are on the Internet and you’ll know how to beat them! 👊

Why perform business competitor search?

Competitor analysis is necessary for a lot of reasons. Here are three important ones:

Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses: Finding competitors for a company allows you to understand their strengths and weaknesses. By comparing your business to competitors, you can identify areas where you excel and where you need improvement.
Market Positioning: Competitor analysis helps you determine where your business stands in the market relative to others. You can assess whether you are a market leader, challenger, follower, or niche player.
Customer Insights: when you find competitor companies in your market and study them, you can gain insights into their customer base, preferences, and behaviors.

As a seasoned digital marketer with over a decade of experience in the industry, I have spent a considerable part of my career conducting competitor analysis. Over the years, I have refined my strategies and processes to find business competitors of the businesses I’ve worked with.

Using this refined process, I will extract the competitors of an imaginary office equipment supplier in New York showing you all the tools and steps while also throwing in some tips.

Without further delay, let's jump in and learn how to find the competitors of a company online without breaking a sweat!

How to find competitor companies on Google Search

Finding competitors for a company in organic search results

First, I’d like to show you the Google Search Scraper, an automation tool that can extract up to 500 search results from a Google search result page and package the data in an Excel file.

My favorite part of this tool is that you can put it on autopilot, and that makes it kinda like an automatic company competitor finder.

To be able to use the Google Search Scraper, you must first create a free account on Botster:

Registration is fast and easy, and your credit card is not required. If you’d love to receive the data you extract in your email, you must also confirm your email address.

Once you’ve done all that, follow the steps below for the first step in how to find competitors of a company:

Launch the Google Search Scraper's start page by clicking on “Start Bot”:

Once you’re on the start page, name your job and also specify a folder if you wish:

Next, enter your commercial keywords as the search keywords.

Commercial keywords are terms that customers or prospects typically use to find businesses like yours on Google. Remember to add your location:

Next up, set how many search results you want this tool to pull from Google:

Under custom options, select the (assumed) device and OS of your audience. If you’re not sure, just run the bot again to capture other devices and OS:

Now, select your preferred language:

Next, set the search location. This should be the same as your business’s location if you operate offline:

Next up, set up your scheduling preferences if you’d like the software to keep finding competitors for a company automatically:

Set your notification options if you’d like to receive the results in your email:

Finally, click on “Start this bot” to launch the bot into action:

Clicking “Start this bot” will open the “My Jobs” page automatically. Here, you can see something like this:

From here, you can view the data online or download the file to your computer using one of the logos in front of “Latest run.”

Video Guide

To show you how I actually use this tool, I prepared a short video guide beforehand. Here it is:

Results

Here’s what the result looks like in Microsoft Excel:

There goes the first step in how to find out competitors of a company.

Tips

Here are a few things that can help you make the most of this data:

First, I’d recommend you sort the results alphabetically by the column titled “Position”. The ones that rank in the top 10 are your strongest competitors for the search keyword.
Next, analyze the titles and descriptions (in the ‘Body’ column) because they contribute a lot to the site’s position in organic search results.
Identify and borrow your high-ranking competitors’ best practices for writing titles and descriptions.

That said, let’s move to the next step in our company competitors search.

Finding business competitors by their ads

Next, I’d like to show you how to find company competitors by the ads they run online. For that, we’ll need the Google Shopping Ads Scraper. This bot can extract the “Shop” adverts displayed above search results.

Follow the steps below to put the tool to use:

Launch the Google Shopping Ads Scraper’s start page and name your job.
Set up the custom options which include OS, device, and language:

Set the location:

Enter your search query. Don’t add location this time around:

Setup scheduling options and launch the bot into action.

Now wait a minute for the tool to find competitors of a company from their ads and extract them into Excel.

Video guide

Watch me explain how to use the Google Shopping Ads Scraper:

Results

Here’s what the result looks like:

Tips

First, you should try analyzing your competitors’ prices and compare them to yours to see if they offer the same products for lower prices or higher prices.
Next, analyze their ad titles using the same keywords in your ad titles. Oftentimes, you’ll be able to tell if their ad copy is better than yours.

Now if you’d like to learn how to find competitor companies in your vicinity, I have just the right tools for that.

How to find companies’ competitors on Google Maps

Local company competitors search

While it’s a good thing to find which companies are directly competing against you on Google and other search engines, it’s equally important to know which ones are pulling your customers offline.

To locally find company competitors, you’ll need the Google Local Business Finder. This tool can extract data from Google Local in BULK into an Excel file.

Follow the steps below to launch the bot:

Launch the Google Local Business Finder’s start page and name your job.
Enter your search query:

Enter the location you want the tool to scan:

Set your scheduling options, launch the bot into action, and that’s it!

This is the first method if you want to find business competitions in the same city as you. There’s one more I’ll show you, but for now, let’s check our results.

Video guide

Watch a quick video on how to launch the Google Local Business Finder:

Results

Tips

For starters, you may visit their websites to analyze their messaging, layout, and whether they have a store where you can peruse their available products.
Next, go to the “Value” column and sort it into descending order. This is the rating for each business, and the ones that have the highest figures likely have the best service.

Quickly, let me show you how to find business competitors in your immediate environment.

Business competitor search by radius

To find competitors that are close to you in real life, you need the Google Maps by Radius Finder. You’ll supply a search keyword, and this tool will extract businesses that operate in that niche within a specified radius.

Here’s how to set up the Google Maps by Radius Finder to find competitors of companies:

On the bot’s start page, look for the box that says “Keywords” and fill in your search keywords:

Set the radius range. The tool will not go beyond the set figure from the starting point:

Set your central search location. I.e., where your search starts:

Finally, launch the tool and wait a brief moment for your results.

Video tutorial

Watch me explain how to launch the Google Maps by Radius Finder:

Results

Within a minute, the Google Maps by Radius Finder will perform a business competitor search within the radius you specified and return the results in bulk:

Tips

First, I’ll suggest sorting by “Business status” and removing closed businesses since they’re technically no longer in competition with you.
Next, sort by “Rating”. If a business has high ratings, then you should spend time studying what they’re doing right so you can adopt the strategy.
Sort the data by the column “Price level” to see which stores offer the costliest and cheapest products.
There are more uses of this software that go beyond the scope of this guide. You can learn more about it in my guide on how to get coordinates from Google Maps.

At this point, I’m quite certain you already know enough about how to find companies’ competitors. But hey, I promised to show you the full process. So I’ll do just that.

How to find business competitors on YouTube

Since we’ve dealt with finding competitors for a company locally, we can come back to online businesses.

This step is particularly useful for YouTube content creators and businesses that leverage YouTube for content marketing. With the YouTube Search Scraper, you can easily extract accounts that post videos on a particular topic.

There are only two steps to it:

One, on the YouTube Search Scraper’s start page, enter your search query:

Two, select how many videos you wish to extract and launch the tool into action:

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy!

Just like that, you’d get 200 competitors exported into an Excel file in less than a minute!