What do you consider for Local SEO competitor difficulty?

I want to know what are the main things you consider when deciding if certain niche or keywords are easy to rank for, I usually look at:

On-Page SEO:​

• Site Content and Structure
• Meta Titles and Descriptions
  • Is the page using the correct top keywords?
  • Are meta titles and descriptions set?
• Website Speed
  • PageSpeed
  • Vitals Assessment (Passed/Failed)

Off-Page SEO:​

• Backlinks on Ahrefs and Unique Domains
• Social Media Presence
• Does the Business Have a Google My Business Listing?
• Google My Business Optimization
  • Reviews, Products, Services, News, Social Profiles

General:​

• Website Age and History on Archive.org

I noticed that sometimes sites are very lacking in some aspects, like content of their pages, but it's still very hard to overrank them, for example there may a website in my local area that provides certain transport services, but their whole home page consists of banner and ordering system, no content, no titles, etc. How is it even possible that website like this continuously keeps on 1st position?

My questions:

1. Do you guys have any other method how you decide if it's worth to invest time in new project?
2. How do you check local seo citations?
3. How do you consider if it's possible to reach top positions?
4. How do you predict how much investment in SEO (backlinks) is needed?

1. Monitor local relevance, NAP consistency, quality of local backlinks, user engagement metrics, schema markup, and mobile optimization.
2. Use tools like Moz Local and BrightLocal, and manually verify listings.
3. Of course it's impossible to accurately verify, but I do a gap analysis and evaluate my unique selling propositions.
4. Analyze backlink profiles and content quality, and your market's competitiveness.

I think You need a agency for this help. Because, they are give you the full details if you want to work with them.