How to Do a Competitor Analysis for a Small Business (Free Template)

Published 2026-09-22

If you run a small business, "competitor analysis" probably sounds like something consultants do for companies with a marketing department. It doesn't have to be. At its core, it's just answering one question clearly: who else is my customer choosing instead of me, and why? This guide walks through how to answer that without spending a whole weekend on it.

Who actually counts as a competitor

Most people start by listing the businesses that look most like theirs, and stop there. That misses two other groups worth including:

• Direct competitors — same product or service, same customer, same area. The obvious ones.
• Indirect competitors — solve the same underlying problem a different way. A meal-kit service competes with a grocery delivery app even though they don't look alike.
• The default alternative — what your customer does if neither of you existed. For a lot of small businesses this is "nothing" or "do it themselves," and it's worth naming because it's often the real thing you're up against.

Five to eight competitors across those groups is usually enough. More than that and the research stops being useful — you end up with a spreadsheet nobody rereads.

What to actually look at for each one

For each competitor, the goal is to answer the same handful of questions, so you can compare them side by side instead of ending up with a pile of disconnected notes:

• Positioning — what do they say about themselves, in their own words? Their homepage headline usually tells you this directly.
• Pricing — not just the number, but the structure. Per-item, subscription, tiered? Structure often matters more than the exact price.
• Strengths — where are they genuinely better than you, or perceived as better? Be honest here; this is the part people tend to skip.
• Weaknesses — where do customers complain, or where does the product/service visibly fall short? Reviews are the fastest way to find this.
• Recent activity — anything they've changed lately (a new offering, a price change, a rebrand). This is what tells you if the competitive picture is shifting, not just what it looked like a year ago.

Where to find this without guessing

You don't need paid tools for most of this:

• The competitor's own website and pricing page.
• Google reviews and any review site relevant to your industry — sort by "most recent" and "lowest rated" for honest complaints.
• Their social media, if they post regularly. Posting frequency and engagement are a rough proxy for how active they actually are right now, not just historically.
• A direct search for "[competitor] vs" — other people have often already written the comparison you're trying to do.

A simple template

For each competitor, fill in one block like this:

• Name:
• Positioning (in their words):
• Pricing:
• Strengths:
• Weaknesses:
• How you compare:

Once you've done this for every competitor, add two more sections that look across all of them rather than at any one:

• Market trends — anything changing across the whole category, not specific to one competitor.
• Opportunities — gaps nobody in your list is filling well.

How often to redo it

A one-time competitor analysis goes stale. A new competitor shows up, an existing one changes their pricing, and the document you wrote six months ago quietly stops being true. For most small businesses, revisiting this once a quarter is enough to catch the changes that matter without turning it into a chore.

Doing this faster

Manually, this process usually takes a couple of hours per competitor once you include the actual searching and reading. If you'd rather skip straight to a filled-in version of the template above, ScoutBrief generates one from a short description of your business — competitors, positioning, pricing, strengths and weaknesses, and market trends, checked against real sources. The first report is free. You can also look at a sample report first to see the exact format before typing anything.