How to Study Your Competition: A Simple Guide for Small Businesses

Studying your market and your rivals is now an ongoing habit. Here is what that means and five steps you can take this week.

Knowing your competition is still one of the most useful things a small business owner can do. Current guides treat it as a habit you repeat every few months, not a one-time task. This week, list your competitors, read their public reviews, and look at free government data about your market.

What market analysis means

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) splits this work into two parts. Market research helps you find customers. Competitive analysis helps you make your business unique. The SBA says you can combine the two to find a competitive advantage. That is a clear reason a customer would pick you over someone else.

The American Marketing Association gives a simple definition. Market analysis is gathering and making sense of facts about your industry, your customers, your competitors and the forces that shape your market. Xero describes competitor analysis as comparing your rivals' strengths, weaknesses, plans and market position to your own.

What is true now

A few points stand out in today's advice.

• It never stops. A guide from llcregister.com says competitor prices, offers and market share change over time. It suggests you review the same factors every few months.
• The internet widens the field. Shopify says the internet puts you in direct competition with thousands of other choices. It cites Statista saying global online sales will reach $3.86 trillion in 2026.
• Marketing is hard at first. In a 2025 Shopify survey, marketing was the top first-year challenge for 37% of store owners.
• Indirect rivals count too. An indirect competitor solves the same problem in a different way. llcregister.com gives an example. A meal-kit service competes with other meal kits, but also with grocery delivery, restaurants and cooking at home.

Free places to look

You do not need to pay for good data. The SBA says many reliable sources give customer and market facts at no cost.

One is County Business Patterns from the U.S. Census Bureau. It is a yearly series. It shows the number of businesses with paid employees, sorted by industry and size. It also shows employment and payroll. This can tell you how many businesses like yours exist in an area.

According to llcregister.com, the SBA also points to these free federal sources:

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for jobs, wages and industry trends.
• The Federal Reserve, for consumer credit and interest rates.
• The Bureau of Economic Analysis, for consumer spending figures.

These will not name your rivals. They do show how big your market is and whether it is growing.

Your competitors also share a lot in public. llcregister.com notes that reading their websites, price pages and reviews is a normal and legal part of research. Xero suggests setting up Google Alerts for competitor names. That is a free tool that emails you when their names show up in the news.

Some libraries offer business databases with ready-made SWOT reports, as the Southern Connecticut State University library explains. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Steps to take this week

1. Make a full list. Write down every business a customer might also consider. Use a local search, industry directories and map apps. Add indirect rivals too.
2. Use the same checklist for each one. llcregister.com says the SBA suggests looking at market share, strengths and weaknesses, pricing, and how each one presents itself. Using the same few factors makes it easy to compare them side by side.
3. Visit their websites. Xero suggests looking at their messages, page layout and calls to action. A call to action is a button or line that asks the visitor to do something, like "Book now."
4. Read their reviews. Xero calls customer reviews one of the most honest sources you can find. Check Google, Yelp and sites for your industry. Repeated complaints often point to a gap you could fill.
5. Look up your local numbers. Use the free County Business Patterns data. Find your industry and your county.
6. Put a reminder on your calendar. Plan to repeat this review in a few months.

One example from Shopify shows how this can pay off. The menswear brand Manmade tested every boxer brief it could find. The founders felt the category was crowded with patterns and extra styles. They chose to compete on fit, comfort and simple design instead.

How I can help

If you want help seeing how your website compares to others in your market, here is some background. AppWT has built more than 600 websites, by its own count. AppWT has a core team of 7. AppWT has been in business since 1997 and has operated as AppWT since 2005. AppWT is based in Livonia, Michigan.

Have a question about anything here? Email me at sales@appwt.com or call (888) 565-0171, and I will answer it.

Sources

• Plan your business - Small Business Administration, U.S. Small Business Administration, 2025-12-18
• How to Conduct a Market Analysis: A Complete Guide for Businesses and Marketers, American Marketing Association, 2025-01-31
• How To Do Competitor Analysis, Xero, 2026-05-06
• How to Research Your Competitors: Steps & Tools, llcregister.com, 2026-10-02
• Competitive Analysis: How to Do It + Free Template (2026) - Shopify, shopify.com
• County Business Patterns, U.S. Census Bureau
• SCSU Hilton C. Buley Library: Marketing: Competitive Analysis, libguides.southernct.edu