What to look for when you audit a competitor's website

Most audits stop at the prospect's own site. You look at the plumber's website, note what is slow or missing, and write the pitch around that. Learning how to audit a competitor's website as well, even briefly, changes what you can say to the prospect. It turns “your site is slow” into “your site is slower than the two other joiners in Preston who rank above you”, which is a different and more persuasive sentence.

Why bother looking at the competitor at all

A business owner who has run the same trade for fifteen years often has no real sense of how their website compares to anyone else's. They built it once, it still loads, and nobody has told them otherwise. Competitor website analysis gives you a second data point to put next to the first one, and a second data point is what turns an opinion into an observation. It also tells you something about the local market before you write a word of outreach: if every competitor in the area has a slow, dated site, the bar you need to clear is low, and if one of them has clearly invested in a proper rebuild, that is worth knowing before you quote a price.

Run the same checklist, just twice

There is no separate method for auditing a competitor. Use the same website audit checklist you already run on the prospect, and apply it to one or two of their closest local competitors as well. Check page speed, whether the site is genuinely mobile friendly rather than just technically responsive, whether it has a valid SSL certificate, what it is built on, and how clearly it tells a visitor what to do next. Keep the notes in the same format for both sites so the comparison is easy to read back later, rather than a paragraph about one and a bullet list about the other.

Picking which competitor to check matters more than it sounds. Search the trade and the town the way a customer would, on a phone, and audit whoever appears near the top of the results rather than whichever business you happen to already know. That is the comparison the prospect actually loses business to, so it is the one worth putting in front of them.

What actually moves the needle in a comparison

Not every difference between two sites is worth raising. A slightly nicer font or a different shade of blue rarely changes whether someone books a job. The differences worth naming are the ones tied to enquiries: does the competitor's site load fast enough on a 3G connection outside a job site, does it have a phone number a mobile visitor can tap without hunting for it, does it show recent work or reviews where the prospect's site shows none, and is it built on something current where the prospect is still running a site nobody has touched in years. These are the same signs covered in old WordPress site problems, and they read very differently to a business owner when they are framed as “here is what the business two streets over is doing that you are not” rather than as a general observation about their own site in isolation.

Using it in the pitch without sounding like a threat

A competitor comparison works best as one line in an email or a report, not the whole pitch. State the fact plainly: their site currently loads in under two seconds and has clear calls to action on mobile, and here is where yours sits against that. Avoid naming the competitor as an attack, since most business owners already know exactly who they compete with locally and do not need it framed as a rivalry. The goal is to give them a reason to act now rather than file the email away, which is the same logic behind using an audit as a sales tool in the first place: specifics move people, generic warnings do not.

Where this goes wrong

Keep the audit to what is publicly visible and factually checkable. Page speed, mobile behaviour, SSL status, broken links and the platform a site runs on are all fair game because anyone can verify them independently. Do not copy a competitor's copy, layout or images into a pitch or a mockup, and do not guess at things you cannot actually see, such as their booking volume or how much they spend on marketing. A comparison built on verifiable facts is persuasive on its own merits. One built on speculation or a lifted design is the kind of thing that undermines trust the moment the prospect checks it themselves, and it is not worth the risk to the pitch or to your reputation locally.

Patchscout makes this comparison quicker because a single search for a trade and a town returns up to twenty results, each with the same audit already run: speed, mobile, SSL, site builder and a fit score, side by side rather than something you assemble by hand across several browser tabs.

The three free searches at app.patchscout.co.uk/signup are enough to see how a whole local market compares, not just one prospect at a time.