Review analysis and competitor analysis are two important local SEO tactics that can play a significant role in boosting your local search visibility.
Analyzing competitor reviews combines elements of both these tactics, allowing you to gain valuable insights into your competitors' strengths and weaknesses that can ultimately help you improve your own business, reviews, and local SEO to drive more traffic and sales.
But analyzing your own reviews manually is time consuming enough � if you throw competitor review analysis into the mix, it can quickly become overwhelming. This is why many businesses and local SEO professionals don't analyze their competitors' reviews at all, meaning they're missing out on major opportunities.
Local Falcon's AI-powered Reviews Analysis tool makes this process more accessible, enabling you to dig deep into the reviews of your competitors and uncover key patterns that can inform your strategies, all in a fraction of the time it takes to do manual review analysis.
By understanding what makes customers choose one business over another, you can refine your approach to attract more nearby customers and improve your rankings in local search results!
Why Is It Important To Analyze Your Competitors' Reviews?
Analyzing your competitors' reviews, also known as doing sentiment analysis for competitor reviews, provides a wealth of insights that can help you optimize your business operations, services, and offerings.
By identifying common themes in customer feedback, you can pinpoint areas where competing businesses are falling short and capitalize on opportunities that your competitors may be missing.
Additionally, sentiment analysis allows you to identify what customers love about your competitors and use that info to help you make improvements to your business to compete more effectively in certain areas.
Understanding the pain points and highlights of your competitors' services can guide you in fine-tuning your own offerings to meet customer needs more effectively, ultimately driving growth and increasing your market share.
Competitive sentiment analysis can also help you get more positive reviews on Google and other relevant review platforms and, since reviews have a direct impact on local rankings, improve your visibility in local search engine results pages (SERPs).
Lastly, competitor review analysis insights can help you refine other areas of your local SEO strategy, particularly when it comes to optimizing your Google Business Profile listing to compete more effectively in your target area(s).
How To Analyze Your Competitors' Reviews with Local Falcon
Analyzing competitors' Google Reviews with Local Falcon is simple. Sentiment analysis for your top three competitors is automatically provided along with any Reviews Analysis Report.
To get started, all you need to do is meet the following two criteria:
- Have a Local Falcon account
- Have run at least one scan for your business
After that, you can use the Reviews Analysis tool to create a new Reviews Analysis Report for your business!
The report will automatically select three top-ranked competitors to include sentiment analysis for, but you can also edit the selection if there are other specific competitors whose reviews you want to analyze instead.
Once you're happy with the selection, you can run the report one time or schedule it to run weekly or monthly to automate your competitive sentiment analysis.
When the report is ready, you can open it up to view insights into your competitors' reviews. There are a few different sections you'll want to look at.
Primary Location vs. Competitor Locations Chart
This chart lets you visualize how you're doing compared to your competitors in terms of Review Quality Score and Review Volume Score, giving you a quick idea of where you stand among the competition according to customer sentiment. You can find out more about what the metrics in Reviews Analysis Reports mean in our knowledge base.
SWOT Analysis
The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis section highlights your own business's strengths and weaknesses based on your customers' feedback, but the opportunities and threats analyses can provide valuable insights drawn from your competitors' reviews.
For example, the opportunities section might point out that one of your competitors has a limited offering of a certain type of product or that their customers frequently mention high prices. This would show that there are opportunities for your business to appeal more to customers by offering a larger variety of products and better prices.
Strategic Recommendations
The strategic recommendations section of your Reviews Analysis Report takes competitor review analysis a step further by providing actionable suggestions for what to actually do with the insights.
This section might, for example, recommend that you capitalize on competitor weaknesses by diversifying your own product or service selection, or streamline your ordering process to make it more convenient than that of your competitors.
Competitor Review Analysis
Each of the (up to) three competitors included in the Reviews Analysis Report gets their own dedicated review analysis section. Here you'll find an overview of the competitor's review performance, as well as specific insights into their service, staff, and quality of products.
This analysis of your competitors' reviews will highlight both the good and bad, providing a comprehensive deep-dive into their performance.
For instance, you might learn that a competing restaurant's quality of food is generally praised as high, but that customers sometimes complain about the lack of seasoning on a certain dish. Or, you might see that there are only positive comments about their service and staff, showing you exactly how high the bar is set.
Examples of What To Do with Competitor Review Analysis Insights
Now that you have a better understanding of how to analyze your competitors' reviews with Local Falcon's Reviews Analysis tool, let's take a look at a couple of different ways businesses could use the insights from Reviews Analysis Reports to improve their business performance and local SEO.
Example #1: Analyzing Competitors' Reviews and Turning Insights into Action for a Popular BBQ Restaurant
For our first hypothetical scenario, let's say you're analyzing your competitors' reviews for a popular BBQ restaurant, located in a city where there's a lot of competition in the BBQ space.
Here are some examples of key insights you might gain from the competitive sentiment analysis for your top competitor:
- The atmosphere at the restaurant is highly praised, with multiple reviews highlighting the cool environment and unique Southern feel.
- The competitor's catering and event services receive positive feedback, particularly for company functions and special events.
- Despite generally positive reviews, some customers have experienced variability in food quality, with specific complaints about dryness and lack of seasoning.
Now, what can you do with these competitor review insights? For starters, you might take a look at your restaurant's decor and ambiance and think about ways to improve it to draw in more customers that place a high value on those elements of their dining experience.
Also, if your restaurant doesn't currently offer catering services, you might consider adding them. This would allow you to compete in additional Google Business Profile categories and service areas and win over a larger share of the market that's interested in ordering BBQ for things like company parties and other special events.
Finally, you could take a look at your own BBQ recipes and make sure your menu items offer superior juiciness and seasoning compared to competitors.
Of course, deciding what to do with competitor review insights is highly subjective, and your decisions on how to act on them will also depend on your personal insights and available resources.
It might not always be realistic to add a whole new service, like catering, to your business's offerings, but you can always keep it in your back pocket for down the road when you are more ready to grow and expand.
Example #2: Using Competitive Sentiment Analysis Insights To Drive Business for a Board Game Store
In our second hypothetical situation, imagine you're doing competitive review analysis for a local board game retailer, and your Reviews Analysis Report provides you with the following insights into customer sentiment about a competitor:
- The store lacks a comprehensive selection of casual games, which could deter a broader range of customers.
- The business has been described as dangerous for one's bank account, indicating aggressive upselling.
- Customers appreciate the reasonable prices and the competitive pricing on the store's products.
In order to capitalize on your competitor's lack of selection of casual games, you could ensure your store is carrying the latest, most popular casual board games. This would help attract a larger share of customers who are not as interested in the more complicated, specialized games that your competitor carries.
Additionally, you might focus on creating a low-pressure shopping environment for your customers, offsetting the aggressive sales tactics of your competitor's employees.
Lastly, you could take a look at your pricing structure and look for opportunities to make it more competitive.
What Happens After You Analyze Competitor Reviews and Leverage Insights?
So you've analyzed your competitors' reviews and implemented business improvements to capitalize on opportunities � what's next?
As with all aspects of local SEO, you should keep monitoring your performance and periodically run new Reviews Analysis Reports to analyze reviews and sentiment for both you and your competitors. This ongoing analysis allows you to track the effectiveness of the changes you've made and assess how they impact your review performance, customer feedback, and local rankings over time.
By staying proactive and continuously refining your approach based on fresh data, you can stay competitive and ensure that your business remains responsive to customer needs and market trends.
Additionally, regular competitor review analysis helps you stay aware of any new strategies or improvements your competitors may be implementing. If you notice shifts in customer sentiment towards your competitors, it can alert you to emerging trends or potential threats. This allows you to pivot quickly and make necessary adjustments before your competitors gain too much ground.
Ultimately, leveraging these insights ensures that your business continues to optimize its services, stand out in local search results, and attract more customers.
Wrapping Up
Analyzing your competitors' reviews with Local Falcon is a powerful way to gain a competitive edge in your market.
By combining review analysis with competitor analysis, you can uncover key insights into what drives customer satisfaction and where your competitors are leaving customers with something to be desired. These insights can help you refine your own business strategies, improve your local SEO, and attract more nearby customers.
With the speed, convenience, and efficiency offered by Local Falcon's Reviews Analysis tool, competitor review analysis becomes a streamlined process, enabling you to focus on taking actionable steps to boost your visibility and drive business growth!