Growth levers
See behind the curtain of your competition’s digital marketing: what they spend, rank, and convert on, broken down by channel with the specific gaps you can exploit this quarter.
Sprint zero · Free · No card
Sprint zero scopes the audience and the system — you see what we’d build before you sign for the build.
Census-grounded
ACS, CBP & LEHD pulls
60+ ICP cards
Shipped, signed off
Outcome-locked
One named outcome per sprint
No retainer trap
Sprints, not rent
Before & after
Status quo
You know your top three competitors by name. You don't know what they spend on Google. You don't know which of their pages drive the most traffic. You're guessing at the gap, and your last team meeting ended with three opinions and no plan.
After the sprint
A written teardown of three named competitors with their spend, rank, and conversion math. The specific channels they're winning on quietly. The categories where they're too entrenched to fight on price. A 90-day action plan attached.
Deliverables
Named artifacts that ship, not verbs. If it’s on this list, the sprint isn’t done until it’s in your hands.
5-phase fit
Every FH engagement maps to one or more phases of the 5-phase process. Lit chips are the phases this service ships against.
New to the 5-phase process? See all five phases →
Timeline & cadence
Week 1
Competitor list locked, scopes signed
Week 2
Per-channel pull (SEO, PPC, social, content)
Week 3
Written teardown delivered
Week 4
Live workshop + action plan
Quarterly
Refreshed read against current SERP
Engagement details
No mystery line items. These are the specific inputs that decide how the engagement is sized and what ships at the end of it.
Number of competitors analyzed (typically 3, 5, or 10)
Channels covered — SEO, PPC, social, email, organic content
Whether deliverable is a written teardown or a live workshop
Quarterly refresh cadence included
Action plan + sprint roadmap attached
Your price
Inputs
Get these together and sprint zero starts the same week.
Anti-patterns
Hard rules. If your last agency promised one of these and the engagement broke, that’s why.
Fit check
Right fit
Wrong fit
Stack
No surprises. You see the stack before sprint zero so you can flag anything you already own a license for or want swapped.
Ahrefs + Semrush + SpyFu
Cross-checked rank, traffic, and ad data — never one tool's word
Meta Ad Library + Google Ads Transparency
Public ad creative + spend signals, straight from the source
BuiltWith + Wappalyzer
Tech stack reveal — what they're running, what's powering the funnel
Manual SERP analysis
What ranks for the queries that actually close, in your geo
Proof
Roofing / Painting · South Florida
50-year roofing and painting firm lacking digital presence. Web, SEO, and PPC tuned to commercial and high-end residential — the leads they had been looking for now show up on the calendar. Site built and hosted on Webflow.
Construction · Custom Homes · Greenville, SC
Veteran-owned luxury custom-home builder. First FH build pivoted the lead mix from junk shower-repair to million-dollar custom-build inquiries; the relaunch (just shipped) deepens the SEO and content cadence on the proven foundation.
Retail / Manufacturing · National
Brand relaunch with a custom site and a competitive SEO program. Traffic up, brand awareness rising, retail partners feeling the pull. Site built and hosted on Webflow.
What do I actually get out of a competitor teardown?
A written report naming what each competitor spends, ranks, and converts on — plus the gaps you can exploit and the categories where they’re too entrenched to fight on price. Action plan attached.
How fresh is the data?
Pulled the week we deliver. We rerun the analysis every 90 days for retainer clients so the next quarter’s plan starts on current intel, not last year’s screenshot.
Will my competitors know you’re looking?
No — everything we pull comes from public sources (search results, ad libraries, social activity, press releases). No grey-area scraping, no ethics calls.
How accurate is the ad-spend estimate?
Within a 20-30% band. Tight enough to know whether they're outspending you 2x or 10x. We cross-check Ahrefs, SpyFu, Meta Ad Library, and direct SERP analysis to triangulate.
Is this useful if I already know my competitors?
Especially then. The teardown surfaces what they're doing that you're not seeing — most clients learn at least one channel their main competitor is winning on quietly.
Is this legal?
Yes. Everything we pull is public — search results, ad libraries, social activity, press releases, public-data tools. No grey-area scraping. No way for the competitor to tell a report was run against them.
Related solutions
Who leads Competitor Analysis
John leads Competitor Analysis engagements.
3 sprint kickoff slots open this quarter
Eight minutes of discovery, audience map and ICP draft back in your inbox. No card. No retainer. No obligation to continue.