You’ve been using Google My Business for a while to access your business reviews left by customers and visitors alike. Getting familiar with their feedback shared with you and their peers has helped you only so far.
Now, you want to take another step ahead and get a complete understanding of your market position by looking at your competitor reviews and ratings. You wonder whether there are more insights that you could discover and how you could do that.
Nowadays, competitor reviews are an essential component of any business’ market research initiative and its internal knowledge and training base.
Understanding who eats from your revenue and customer pie, and why, can help many parties involved in running your multi-location business chain to act more knowledgeable:
- your store managers and staff. Understanding how each location stands out against its competitors across the street and why will help your staff be more competitive not only against other stores within your chain but those relevant in their neighborhood.
- your area managers. They are busy people, walking or traveling around, visiting each location in their area. Getting a broader understanding of how their stores perform against competitors will help them lead their store teams better.
- top management and owners. They need to make strategic decisions at different levels of the organizational structure. Therefore, they need to understand which locations perform better than others and how they compare with their competitors based on the market’s voice.
- investors. Providing your investors with proposals on how they could better support your business, backed up by customer insights and market analysis, can only help them make better informed decisions in the long run.
While Google My Business can get you closer to your own multi-location store reviews, your competitor reviews remain hidden and inaccessible.
For your competitor reviews, Google My Business becomes futile.
Let’s find out why and what alternative business chains have!
1. Why Google My Business can’t show my competitor reviews
Google My Business is dedicated to your business locations, as its name says.
You can benefit from it only for your business reviews:
- You can check your reviews directly into your Google My Business account for one location at a time – which can be time-consuming if you supervise an area or an entire business.
- Or, more efficiently, you can use a third-party platform integrated with Google My Business that brings and manages reviews across multiple locations in a single place.
When it comes to your competitors, Google My Business does not provide you with access to their reviews. Simply putting it, for Google, competitor reviews are not of your business!
Therefore, you need a third-party service capable of doing that, just like Google My Business does for your business reviews.
2. The alternative solution
To gain access to your competitor reviews, you can use FeedCheck – a single panel of commands for all competitor and own reviews.
With FeedCheck, you can benefit from:
- a review aggregation engine that brings in past and new reviews of any competitor location,
- a dashboard that allows you to read reviews and analyze them,
- a review notification system that sends custom filtered reviews out to your inbox or a dedicated slack or zendesk channel,
- an API that helps you add competitor reviews to other business data for further inter-correlation analysis and business decisions.
FeedCheck supports any number of competitors you need to analyze and keep an eye on over time.
3. How to set up your competitor reviews in FeedCheck
There are three simple, easy to take steps to get access to your competitor reviews:
Step 1: Define who your competition is
First and foremost, you need to determine who you consider a competitor.
You may define competitors in many ways:
- from how they are championing in a particular market segment by their business profile, turnover, geo-location, or the number of locations,
- to who is eating customers on bread right before your nose — in other words, store locations situated right in your area and which are always one step ahead in providing the best customer experience: location design, dish innovation, suppliers they work with, pet friendly, and so on. They may be or not part of a large chain, but they win at business right on your street area.
Step 2: Define your competitor benchmark analysis
Start with one location at a time
The most granular level of analysis is at the location level. That means you can compare your location reviews with one or more competitor locations from your street or neighborhood.
Understanding their review volume over time, rating trend, and customer sentiment across all channels gives you the pulse of the business taken directly from the customer’s voice.
Continue with your area review analysis
Look at your area(s) to see how multiple locations within a neighborhood perform against competitor locations within that area.
The grand overview: aggregated reviews at the chain level
In the end, you can have a grand overview of the entire business and how it performs against each competitor category.
Step 3: Prepare and upload your competitors’ Google reviews web-pages to FeedCheck
FeedCheck needs to know where to read your competitor location reviews from so it gets right to your competitors’ Google review pages.
You can start gathering this data on your end or, we can do that for you.
Your competitors’ reviews are ON
At this stage, you start receiving competitors’ Google reviews and can visualize your business performance from different angles in your dashboard.
Conclusion
Google My Business may not help you monitor your competitor reviews but, FeedCheck can.
Enabled with the most cost-effective and almost real-time market research tool, you can understand where you are winning and where you are losing in your geography and adjust your strategy so that you don’t miss on potentially significant revenues.
Knowing your potential customers is a big plus that opens doors to vast possibilities to position your business better, communicate, and innovate. Don’t miss the opportunity when it’s so close to you!
