My Business: How To Spy On Your Competitors’ GMB Listings

In this video I'm going to show you how you can see what categories your competitors have selected from within their GMB dashboard. This is what I like to call an SEO ninja hack as it’s super advanced, although it’s very easy to do. It’s a super powerful method, indeed. As you all already know, the categories you select will have a massive impact on where you rank in the Maps listing. So knowing what your competitors have selected will give you that unfair advantage. Just a word of warning, please do keep this to yourself and do not share it out there as the more people that know about it, the more hard it will be for all of us to rank.

So without further ado, let’s dive into it and I’ll show you exactly how you can figure it out. So the first thing you need to do is go over to Google and search for one of the keywords you’re targeting. So I’ve done that already, I’ve typed in flooring contractor Richmond, Virginia, and then I now want to pick any random business from the map pack. So I actually recommend you do this for all businesses, just to see all the categories that all are targeting. So I’m going to go for this one in the middle as an example, so let’s give this a click.

The pages now are loaded, so I’m gonna go for Jones Flooring and Tile which is actually the business in position two. So once you have this page loaded, you want to copy the title, and then go over to google.com/maps and simply paste in the GMB title. And as you can see, it’s found the GMB listing. I do know it’s the right one, as it has Richmond, Virginia, which is obviously the area I’m targeting. So let’s give that a click.

This will now bring up a page which looks like this. The next thing you wanna do before you actually go any further is just note the main category they have selected. So Jones Flooring and Tile have selected flooring contractor as a main category. So I’m going to copy this and then come off that and then simply do a right-click and then go to view page source. So this only works if you’re using Google Chrome, so please do bear that in mind as well. So let’s click view page source.

And then the next thing that I want to do is simply do a Ctrl + F and paste in the category I just saw on the previous page, which for me was flooring contractor. So as you can see, Google has now highlighted all the times they’ve mentioned flooring contractor in the backend in the GMB dashboard. So I’ve got flooring contractor right here, which is highlighted and if you look after that, we also have some more GMB categories. We’ve got floor refinishing service. We’ve got wood floor refinished service right here. Again, we’ve got wood and laminate flooring supplier. If we look above that, so before the category, we’ve got carpet fitter, which is another category.

We’ve got tile contractor, we’ve got carpet retail shop, we’ve got tile shop, we’ve got rug shop, we’ve got flooring shop, so tons and tons of categories this company has selected. So we can use it to our advantage and then make sure if we haven’t included any of these categories, we go into our GMB dashboard and add these categories in as well. And one thing just to bear in mind as well, sometimes when you type in your main keyword and do a Ctrl + F, you might land on something which looks like this. And from this point onwards, you know, you might think, Hey, they don’t actually have any other GMB categories. They’ve just got flooring contractor and that is it.

Just do bear in mind, you want to look at, obviously, how many times you’ve found that match on the page and just go through it until you find kind of where the big bulk of the list is, which for me was obviously where I showed you just now, which is going to be here, flooring contractor, all the way up to here as well and do bear in mind this only works if your competitor has selected multiple categories. If they haven’t, then you’re only going to see one in here anyway, so.

One other thing that I want to show you as well, if all the people you are competing with or all the businesses I should say, have very generic business names, such as this one, American Floors, it’s going to be a little bit hard for you to find the listing. So if you go to American floors and do a search here, for example, you can see we’ve got tons of different results here. So it’s quite time consuming to go through all of them, just to figure out which is the one you’re actually competing with.

What you can actually do is just type their address, so take the full address, copy that, and then paste that into the Google Maps URL, and actually bring up a section down here, which says, at this location. And as you can see, at this location, we have one business called American Floors. So now I can give that a click and be super confident that this is actually the listing for the one I saw in the map pack. And again, I can further confirm that just by looking at the address here, which says Richmond, Virginia. So hopefully you guys found that useful and gives you that unfair advantage you need to overrank your competition.