Who counts as a competitor for a med spa?

Two groups. Practices within realistic driving distance that offer overlapping treatments, and whatever currently ranks for your target terms — which often includes directories and national chains. The second group tells you what you are competing against in search, even when they are not competing for the same patients.

How often should I run a competitor analysis?

A thorough audit once or twice a year, with a lightweight monthly check on which competitors appear in AI answers for your tracked questions. Competitive landscapes in aesthetics move slowly enough that quarterly deep audits are usually wasted effort.

What tools do I need for a competitor audit?

Very little. Incognito searches, your competitors' websites, their Google Business Profiles, and an AI assistant will surface most gaps. Paid tools like Ahrefs or Semrush add backlink and keyword data that is useful but rarely where the biggest opportunities are hiding.

Should I copy what my top competitor is doing?

Copy the structure, never the content. If they rank because they have thorough cost information and a treatment comparison page, build your own versions. Duplicating their copy creates a near-duplicate page that will lose to the original and can damage your own site.

What if my competitors are all doing better than me?

That is usually good news, because it means the gaps are well-defined and the tactics are already proven in your market. Start with whichever gap has the shortest path to closure, which is almost always a treatment page you are missing or an under-answered cost question.

How to Run a Med Spa Competitor Analysis

Most Competitor Audits Produce a Document, Not a Decision

The standard competitor analysis is a large spreadsheet comparing domain authority, backlink counts, and estimated traffic across six practices. It takes two days to produce and changes nothing about what anyone does next.

The problem is that those metrics describe outcomes rather than causes. Knowing a competitor has a domain rating of 34 to your 21 does not tell you what to do on Monday.

A useful audit answers a different question: what specifically do they have that I do not, and which of those gaps can I close fastest?

That produces a list of pages to write, not a report to file.

Identify the Right Competitors

You have two competitor sets, and conflating them causes most of the confusion in this exercise.

Business competitors are practices within a realistic drive that offer overlapping treatments. These are who you lose patients to.

Search competitors are whatever actually ranks for your target terms. This routinely includes directories, national chains, and content sites that are not competing for your patients at all but are occupying the results you want.

Both matter, differently. Business competitors tell you what patients in your market are being offered. Search competitors tell you what you must outperform to be found at all.

Pick four or five business competitors and note the top three search competitors for your five most important terms. That is your set. More than that and the exercise collapses under its own weight.

The Four Things Worth Comparing

1. Treatment page coverage

List every treatment you offer. Then check whether each competitor has a dedicated page for it, and whether you do.

The most common finding is not that competitors have better pages. It is that they have pages for treatments you offer but have never written about. A practice offering fifteen treatments with six service pages is effectively invisible for nine of them.

Note also treatments they offer that you do not. That is a business question rather than a content one, but it is worth surfacing while you are looking.

2. Question coverage

For each competitor's main treatment pages, list the questions they answer: cost, pain, downtime, session count, candidacy, aftercare, reversibility, comparisons.

Then check yours against the same list.

This is where the majority of actionable gaps live, and it takes about twenty minutes per competitor. You will typically find two or three questions that every competitor answers and you do not. Usually cost.

3. Local presence

Compare Google Business Profiles side by side: review count, average rating, review recency, how many services are listed, whether they post, whether they answer questions.

Review recency matters more than total count. A practice with 90 reviews including twelve from the last quarter outperforms one with 300 reviews that stopped arriving in 2024. Our post on patient reviews and visibility covers why.

4. AI citation share

Run your tracked question list — the one from our post on measuring AI visibility — and record which competitors are cited.

This is the highest-signal part of the audit and the part almost nobody does. A competitor cited across eight of fifteen questions has content worth reading page by page, because an engine has already judged it the most useful source in your market.

Reading a Competitor's Page Properly

When you find a page that consistently outranks or out-cites yours, read it structurally rather than stylistically.

Ask: what questions does this answer, and in what order? Where does the answer appear relative to the heading? Is there cost information? Is there a named author with credentials? How long is it, and how much of that length is substance rather than padding?

You are reverse-engineering the structure, not the prose. The structure is what you rebuild in your own voice, with your own clinical experience and your own numbers.

Copying the writing itself creates a near-duplicate that will lose to the original and may harm your own page. Copying the structure is simply learning what the market rewards.

Turning Findings Into a Plan

The output of the audit should fit on one page. Something like:

Three treatment pages we do not have: Sculptra, laser hair removal, chemical peels
Two questions every competitor answers and we do not: cost ranges, session counts
Our review recency is behind: eleven reviews in six months against their thirty
Competitor X is cited in most AI answers; their comparison pages are the reason

Then sequence by effort against impact. Missing treatment pages for treatments you already perform are usually the fastest wins — the expertise exists, only the page is absent.

Assign dates. An audit without dates becomes a document, which is where this exercise usually dies.

The Gaps You Will Almost Certainly Find

Having run this exercise across a lot of practices, the same handful of gaps appear with remarkable consistency. Knowing them in advance makes the audit faster.

Missing treatment pages. Nearly universal. Practices offer twelve to twenty treatments and have pages for six. Every missing page is a treatment you perform, have expertise in, and are invisible for.

No cost information anywhere. The most-searched aspect of nearly every treatment, and the one most practices avoid entirely. Whichever competitor addresses it captures the traffic.

Stale Google Business Profiles. Hours that were right two years ago, services listed as a single vague category, no posts since 2024, and unanswered questions sitting on the profile.

Review requests that stopped. A practice gathers reviews enthusiastically for three months after someone reads an article about it, then stops. Recency shows.

No comparison content. Comparison searches are among the highest-intent queries in aesthetics and are largely served by manufacturer sites and national chains, because local practices rarely write them.

Anonymous clinical content. Blog posts with no named author on medical topics, in a category where authorship carries unusual weight.

If your audit surfaces four of these six, you are entirely typical, and you have a clear list of work with well-understood returns.

What to Ignore

Vanity metrics. Domain authority and estimated traffic are directional at best and rarely tell you what to do next.

Design. Their site may be prettier than yours. That is almost never why they outrank you.

Ad spend. Paid presence is a different channel and tells you little about organic opportunity.

Everything at once. An audit surfacing thirty gaps produces paralysis. Take the top five and finish them.

Run It This Quarter

Pick four competitors. Spend two hours: treatment page coverage, question coverage, Google Business Profile comparison, and a run of your question list through an AI assistant.

You will finish with a short list of specific, closable gaps, which is the entire point of the exercise.

If you would rather have this run properly across your market, book a free visibility check and we will deliver the gap analysis for you.

How to Run a Med Spa Competitor Analysis That Finds Real Gaps