You sell products and/or services to customers.
When you first started your business, maybe you had some ideas of why your products/services are better than the competition.
At least, I hope you did.
You thought you were solving xx for your customers, but how do you know?
You can run surveys of your current customers to find out.
You can hire a third-party to conduct interviews.
Or…
You can look at your current reviews.
Don’t have a lot of reviews or your business is pretty new?
You can look at the reviews of your competitors.
Even if you have a plethora of reviews, you should still look at your competitors.
Mining your own and your competitor’s reviews give you an unfair advantage.
If you have ever played sports, mining reviews is like looking at your opponent’s playbook.
Mining your own reviews helps you identify what and why people love your business.
You’ll be able to take what customers love about your business and add/update content on your website.
If you have a fair amount of negative reviews, it can assist you in identifying holes in your business that you need to address.
If your competitors have a fair amount of negative reviews, you can use this to double-down on their weaknesses within your business.
HOW TO RUN A REVIEW ANALYSIS FOR YOUR BUSINESS
This is going to be a lot easier than you think, thanks to your Google My Business listing.
Navigate to your Google My Business listing and click on “xxx Google Reviews”.
This will open the listing’s review box.
In the example above, you’ll see a +6 button. Your number will likely be different. Click on the button.
What we are seeing are the common occurrences of words found in the review content.
Several of these words can be placed into the same category.
Responsive > Communication > Manager.
All 3 of these highlights show that customers are very happy with the level of communication CottageCare offers.
Dogs is an interesting occurrence that should looked at further.
We would assume a decent percentage of CottageCare Portland’s clients are pet owners.
When looking at the location page copy for CottageCare Portland, there is no mention of pets or house cleaning with pets.
This is a great example of something a company is solving for customers, the customers are talking about it in reviews, but there is no mention of this on the website.
We came up with these conclusions in a matter of 2 minutes.
Imagine the potential impact of working with a great copywriter that is able to take this information and write great copy that talks about these findings.
We’re not done yet.
Repeat the same process for a few of your competitors.
Both of these local competitors have cats listed as common occurrences in reviews.
Both have eco-friendly, and similar versions of Communication.
This whole process has taken a few minutes but we have a lot of useful information.
We know that people looking for a house cleaner in Portland are looking for;
- Great communication
- Cleaning a home that has pets
- Eco-friendly cleaning products
WHAT TO DO WITH THIS INFORMATION?
Go through your website to see if these are covered, even before a potential customer is thinking of it.
CottageCare Portland does use eco-friendly cleaning products and it’s talked about on their location page.
House cleaning with pets is not talked about at all.
You could add a new section and call it “Home cleaning with pets” but that would make users have to find the section on that page.
A question like this might not be asked by a user, you have to provide the answer before the question exists.
Adding a mention or two in the regular copy will help and if there are any lists on the page, it should be added there, too.
A dedicated section could be added and linked to from the other mentions on the page that goes into deeper detail of what they do for cleaning a home that has pets.
A photo or two (a before and after photo would be great) added would help show results.
BOTTOM-LINE
A process like this will not take you a ton of time to perform but the results it can shed light on could make a huge impact on your business in the future.
