How to Run a Med Spa Competitor Analysis (Without Guessing)
By the Med Spa Growth Company team
The short answer
A useful med spa competitor analysis looks past just pricing and covers Google Business Profile completeness, review volume and content, website and treatment-page depth, and — increasingly — whether AI assistants name a competitor over you for the same searches. Most practices only ever check competitor pricing, which misses most of what's actually driving the difference in bookings.
"Competitor analysis" for a lot of med spas means checking what a nearby practice charges for Botox once and calling it done. That's useful information, but it's a small slice of what actually determines whether a patient books with you or with them. A fuller competitor analysis looks at Google Business Profile strength, review depth, website content, and — for a growing share of searches — how AI assistants describe each of you.
Start with who you're actually competing against
Search the treatments you offer as a patient would — "botox [city]," "best med spa near me," "laser hair removal [neighborhood]" — and note who consistently shows up in the map pack and organic results. That list is often different from the practices you'd name as competitors just from being in the same area; proximity doesn't guarantee visibility, and visibility is what actually matters for new-patient discovery.
Google Business Profile comparison
- How many services are listed, and how specifically ("Botox" vs. just "injectables")
- Review count and review velocity — recent reviews, not just total
- Whether photos are current and show real results or the actual space
- How quickly and thoroughly they respond to reviews, including negative ones
Website and content depth
Do competitors have a dedicated page for each treatment, or one general services page? Individual treatment pages tend to rank better for specific searches and give AI assistants more to work with when describing what a practice offers. If a competitor has 15 treatment-specific pages and you have one general page, that's a concrete, fixable gap — not a mystery about why they're outranking you.
Check AI visibility, not just search rankings
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or a similar tool the same questions a patient might — "best med spa for lip filler in [city]" — and see who gets named. This is a newer, less obvious layer of competition: a practice can rank reasonably in Google and still be invisible in AI-generated answers, or vice versa, because the two draw on different signals. See our guide on AI visibility vs. SEO for what separates them.
Turn findings into a short list, not a report you never revisit
A competitor analysis is only useful if it produces two or three concrete actions — build the treatment pages you're missing, close the review-response gap, fill out the Google Business Profile services list completely. Redo the exercise every few months rather than treating it as a one-time project; competitors' visibility shifts, and so does yours.
Frequently asked questions
How many competitors should I analyze?
Three to five practices that consistently show up for your core treatment searches is usually enough to spot real patterns without the exercise becoming unmanageable.
Is competitor pricing still worth checking?
Yes, but treat it as one data point among several rather than the whole analysis — see our guide on pricing med spa services for why matching a competitor's price alone isn't a strategy.
How is this different from just reading a competitor's Google reviews?
Reviews are one part of a fuller picture that also includes Google Business Profile completeness, website content depth, and how AI assistants describe each practice — reading reviews alone misses the structural gaps that are often easier to fix.
How often should I redo a competitor analysis?
Every few months is reasonable for most practices — visibility and competitor activity shift gradually, not overnight, so a quarterly check tends to catch what matters without becoming a constant distraction.