Why It Matters To Keep Track of Your Competitors’ Online Reputation and Star Ratings

Do you check your competitors’ online reputations? 

Perhaps you should. Competitor analysis provides insights that allow companies to make data-driven decisions and strengthen their online reputation management (ORM) strategy. Through business reputation monitoring, you can see where you stand relative to others in terms of review volume and recency, star rating, brand sentiment and more. This information can help you identify gaps and opportunities in managing your online reputation.   

This blog discusses the importance of online ratings in compelling potential clients or customers to choose you over a competitor. For example, one report found that most consumers would consider a business with an average of 3.5-star ratings and above. And between two brands, one with 3.5 stars and the other with 4 stars, people would pass up on the option with the lower rating. 

Which of the two brands above are you? If you have no idea where you stand, you can’t know which way to steer your business reputation management efforts. First, you must establish some baseline. To do that, you need to unpack the rationale and benefits of tracking your competitors’ online ratings and, ultimately, reputations. 

4 Reasons To Apply Business Reputation Monitoring to Your Competitors

Competitor analysis can be an efficient tool for managing online reputation. Looking into the ratings and reviews of your rivals can provide you with qualitative insights, which you can use to enhance your strategy. 

Here are four of the insights to glean and benefits to gain by monitoring your competitors’ online reputations:

1. Know Your Close Competitors

The best online reputation management services incorporate competitor analysis. Experts recognize that online ratings and reviews allow brands and businesses to extend their competitor research to managing online reputation. They tap into qualitative data containing rich insights into what others are doing right, such as products, services, promotions and sales.

Understand your competitors using the customers’ perspective on aspects, such as: 

• Brand sentiment: Customer awareness of and emotional connection to the brand.
• Product/Service satisfaction: Competitor offerings’ unique selling propositions or strengths.
• Customer journey: Areas in which the competitors excel.

The takeaway here is that you can collect and analyze readily available information for large or small business reputation management.

2. Get Chosen by Potential Customers

As we said earlier, online review monitoring clues you in on where you stack up against competitors. It then enables you to improve the quality of your reviews and ratings accordingly – whether you ramp up your ORM strategies in-house or with help from reputation management consultants to beat other brands or businesses.

One of ORM’s ultimate goals is to boost your business reputation management through stellar user feedback, directly impacting where people spend their money. When faced with options, approximately 31 percent will buy from a business with the most positive reviews. You become the obvious choice for prospective customers if you have more rave reviews and higher star ratings.

3. Find Gaps in Your Review Generation and Review Response 

Managing your online reputation through competitor online review monitoring is a brilliant way to note how other businesses manage their reviews. This tactic allows you to see their strengths and weaknesses, finding gaps in their approach. For instance, you notice they are not responding to positive reviews or are dealing with negative feedback improperly. 

As such, you can take advantage of the opportunity to provide better review responses, earning people’s trust. Use a reputation management tool to automate your review generation and response, or work with an online reputation expert to reply to your customers manually. 

4. Create More Value for Existing and Potential Customers

Customers can share their experience online with a brand at an unprecedented speed and scale. Unfortunately, this includes unsatisfactory ratings and negative feedback. 

Are you afraid of being bashed or canceled? Experienced online reputation management companies would be the first to tell you it’s part of the ORM landscape. But they would also remind you that nothing beats consistently creating value for your customers. It’s one of the pillars of good business reputation management. And with an excellent online review monitoring strategy, you can learn from your competitor’s experience how or how not to deal with the ugly side of the internet. 

Further, you can look for gaps other businesses don’t fulfill but are essential to customers.

Pro-tip: If you’ve accumulated bad reviews and are worried about its effect on your revenue, you can rely on online reputation repair to get you back on track. But also, use the insights gleaned from the negative comments to do better and increase your competitiveness.

Ways To Outrank Your Competitors’ Star Ratings

Now that you know why business reputation monitoring is critical, you have an idea of where you stand and how to apply the insights into your ORM strategy. You can also focus on bolstering your star ratings using the best online reputation management tactics:

• Online reputation repair: Rebuild your online reputation via proactive tactics like creating your company’s Facebook page and encouraging positive ratings. You can also do damage control by requesting Google to remove defamatory or false content from your listing.
• Review generation: Recency matters to audiences. According to an online reputation expert study, 62 percent of consumers will not purchase a product from a brand with old reviews (published one year ago or more). Generating reviews is the process of gathering fresh feedback from recent customers continuously.
• Review response: Whether positive or negative, review response shows you acknowledge user feedback and allows you to address issues from unhappy customers.

Improving your reviews and ratings ultimately enhances your search engine ranking as they can be displayed in the results, compelling your target audience to click.

Jumpstart Your Competitor Analysis With a Reputation Scorecard

These days, managing online reputation through competitor analysis requires the right strategy and some automation. Rize Reviews’ reputation management consultants can help you with both. One of the tools we provide you is a reputation scorecard.

This report shows your review volume, average rating, review recency and review sentiment. It then analyzes how you measure up in these areas against your closest competitors. How does it work? It looks for similar companies nearby based on geography and gives you an overall score for all the factors mentioned. 

The reputation scorecard is detailed and visual, so it’s easy to use and understand. Take advantage of this online reputation expert-designed tool to see where you stand and how you can improve your star ratings and reviews. You also receive a recommendation at the bottom of the page, pointing out your next steps.

Grab Your Chance To Stand Out From the Competition

Rize Reviews offers a FREE Review Scorecard report for up to five of a business’s competitors. This online reputation management tool shows you just how you perform against your top competitors for online reputation management. You can also use the scores to decide on ways to increase your star ratings. 

Of course, this is only the beginning of managing your online reputation. But if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, you can tap professionals to help you with your needs, whether big or small business reputation management.

The good thing is you need not search further for online reputation management companies. At Rize, we do not just provide you with a free review scorecard. We can also use the data to devise an end-to-end ORM solution. Our reputation management services span online reputation repair, review monitoring, review generation and review response.

Compare yourself to the competition and then outrank them when you leverage the skills and experience of the best online reputation management experts at Rize.

Send us a message to get started.