Competitor Analysis: A Practical Guide for Irish SMEs

Competitor analysis means finding out what rival businesses sell, what they charge and what they promise, then using that to make your own decisions. According to Local Enterprise Office Kildare, competitor analysis is used to weigh up competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, find strategies for advantage, spot barriers to entry and find weaknesses you can use to your advantage. For an Irish small business, the useful version is short, dated and built only on public information.

Why most businesses start competitor analysis too late#

Most competitor analysis begins with bad news rather than curiosity. A quiet month, a regular customer who stops coming in, or a quote lost on price sends an owner to rival websites for the first time. That first look usually takes weeks of screenshots, half-remembered prices and guesswork, and by then the competitor has already made the change and moved on. The review then stops once the panic passes, so the next surprise finds the business just as unprepared.

Take Cathal, who runs a small garden centre in Ennis. He started looking at other centres only after a customer he had served for years said she had found the same shrubs cheaper in a nearby town. He had no record of what those centres charged a year earlier, so he could not tell whether they had cut prices or he had drifted upwards on his own.

Watch out: A review started after a lost quote is a hurried one, and it usually stops as soon as sales recover.

Which competitors should an Irish SME compare itself with?#

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Cathal’s list was short and easy to write, and most Irish businesses can do the same. Three groups belong on it.

Direct competitors sell something close to what you sell, to the same customers, in the same area. For Cathal that means the other garden centres in and around Ennis. Indirect competitors solve the same problem in a different way, such as the hardware shop that has started selling bedding plants or the online plant retailer that delivers to Clare. New local rivals are businesses that have just opened, added a service, opened a second branch or started delivering into your area.

Leave out anyone you cannot realistically win customers from. That covers national brands competing on scale, businesses in towns your customers never visit, and directory or marketplace listings that are not businesses at all. Keep the list short enough that every name gets a proper check.

Above all, the customer matters more than the list itself. The Local Enterprise Office Galway says the key to beating the competition is understanding your customer and why they buy or do not buy from you, and it recommends using SWOT analysis (A short review of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.) to organise what you find.

What to check on a competitor’s website#

With the list settled, the same six checks apply to every name on it. Take them in the same order each time.

• Prices and packages. Note the prices they publish, what each package includes, delivery charges and minimum orders.
• Services and products. Compare against your last check to see what has been added or removed.
• Offers and promotions. Record discounts, bundles, free delivery and seasonal deals, and whether an end date is shown.
• Promises and guarantees. Look for delivery times, reply times, refund wording and claims such as a same-day response.
• Articles and questions. Read their blog or help pages to see which customer questions they answer, and in what order.
• New features. Check for online booking, live chat (a message window on the site), click-and-collect (order online, collect in store) or new payment options, because these change how easy the business is to buy from.

The checks are quick once the exact wording is copied across. Cathal noticed that one competitor had added online booking for a garden design visit, something he had not seen locally before.

Tip: Save a dated screenshot or PDF of every page you check, so the next comparison shows what actually changed.

How to do competitor analysis#

Details copied from a website are only useful if they live in one place, so the process matters as much as the list. Here is a method that one person can run.

1. Open one document or spreadsheet for the whole project and group the competitor list into direct, indirect and new local rivals.
2. Record what each website shows today. Check the home page, prices page, services page, offers banner and any booking or chat window. Copy the exact wording, and put the date at the top of the entry.
3. Note the reviews. Read public review pages for themes rather than the score, because what customers complain about often shows where a competitor is weak.
4. Check their ads in the Ads Transparency Center (Google’s public library of ads running on its platforms.). According to Google Ads Help, you can search it by advertiser name or website and report an ad. Google Ads Help also confirms that ads served on Google platforms such as Google Search and YouTube can be found there.
5. Only if the business already runs Google Ads, look at Auction Insights (A Google Ads report that shows which advertisers appear alongside your ads.). Google Ads Help recommends it to see how shifts in competitors above or below you on the Search Network (the search pages where your ads can run) may have affected performance. Businesses without Google Ads can skip this step.
6. Keep everything in one record with dates. Note the competitor, what you checked, what it showed, the page address and the date. A first pass on one competitor takes about an hour, and later passes are quicker because you are only looking for changes.

One common mistake is writing opinions instead of facts. “Their prices look high” cannot be checked later, while “free delivery on every order” can.

Note: Stick to public pages. Never send a fake enquiry, sign in to a competitor’s account or collect personal data about their staff or customers.

Competitor benchmarking: what to measure#

Collecting the notes is one job, and comparing them is the next. Use a simple scorecard for benchmarking (Comparing your business against rivals on the same measures.): the same measures, filled in for your own business and for each competitor.

The scorecard works because it compares like with like. Cathal filled in his own column first, then the two local garden centres, so the differences stood out in words rather than feelings. Where a competitor clearly leads, decide whether that difference matters to your customers before you spend money on it. Keeping the scorecard up to date is repetitive work, and some businesses put the gathering on a schedule with AI automation instead of relying on memory.

How often to check competitors, and why to keep a record#

A scorecard is only as good as its dates. A single review shows what a competitor looked like on one afternoon, while a dated record shows how prices and offers moved over the year. That history is the part that changes decisions.

Prices and offers deserve a monthly look, because they change most often. Services, content and website features move more slowly, so a quarterly check is usually enough. A busy online shop may want a weekly look at ads and offers, since those can change within days.

If the business runs Google Ads, the account carries a daily feed of market trends. Google Ads Help says the Insights page helps identify trends in your market and understand your performance, and it updates daily. Website change alert tools also exist as a category: they watch a page and tell you when it moves, which suits a longer competitor list.

Where nobody has time for the weekly check, ongoing competitor monitoring keeps the record current and sends a short summary of what changed. Cathal set his prices and offers check for the first of every month, and a longer look at services and content each quarter.

How Baikou keeps its own competitor record#

Baikou keeps the same kind of record on its own market. An automated radar checks the websites of 19 agencies in Ireland and the UK and keeps a dated list of every new page they publish.

• The first check saved every page each agency already had, so later checks show only what is new.
• New pages that look like services are flagged, while blog posts and case studies are filtered out.
• Each website is checked about once a week, without anyone opening it by hand.
• Once a month the new pages are read together with search demand data to decide which services are worth building next.

For a business like Cathal’s, the same approach can watch the prices and offers of nearby garden centres, so the history is already there before the next quiet month.

What to do after competitor analysis#

Turn the record into one decision at a time, not a long list. That might be a price that looks out of line, or a service that needs repositioning. It might also be an offer with a clear end date, or a plain answer to a question customers keep asking. For Cathal, it meant adding delivery terms and the two most common customer questions to his own prices page. Baikou helps Irish businesses with competitor monitoring and AI automation, and the details are on its home page.

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