How to Mine for Competitor Insights Using BrightLocal’s Review API

When Kogneta’s Jordan Choo contacted us saying he’d created a brand-new free tool using our Reviews API (find out more about our APIs here), we just knew we had to share the results with you. Here, Jordan shares his exciting new tool designed to help you analyze your own reviews and mine competitor reviews for insights.

Read on to find out how you can benefit from the Kogneta and BrightLocal Reviewalyzer…

There’s no doubt that reviews should be a critical part of a business’s local marketing strategy, not only from an SEO perspective but from a reputation standpoint as well. This is perfectly illustrated in these online review statistics.

With more and more businesses generating reviews on a yearly basis, how do you use not only your reviews but your competitors’, to successfully grow?

BrightLocal Online Reputation Management Survey

Thanks to a new tool that I put together using BrightLocal’s handy Review API, you’re now able to mine your competitors’ reviews at scale and incorporate these findings into your SEO and overall marketing strategy.

I’ve found it to be extremely useful in understanding not only what makes a competitor stand out from their positive reviews, but where they drop the ball by looking at their negative reviews.

So without further ado, I am happy to introduce…

BrightLocal and Kogneta’s Reviewalyzer

You can grab your version of the Reviewalyzer by making a copy of it here.

How to Use the Tool

With the help of BrightLocal’s Reviews API, we’re able to use AppScript, which is a JavaScript-based language, to create a miniature app inside of Google Sheets to gather the reviews of multiple businesses in bulk. Below you can find a step-by-step process on how to get it running and how to leverage the tool for your own business.

Add Your BrightLocal API Credentials

The first thing that you’ll want to do is get your BrightLocal API credentials. You can find your API key and API secret by navigating to your Account Setting drop-down, and clicking on the API Access option. Once the API Access page loads, you’ll be presented with your API Key and API Secret as shown in the annotated screenshot below:

BrightLocal API key

Copy your API Key and API Secret into the Config tab in the BrightLocal and Kogneta’s Reviewalyzer. Your BrightLocal API key will go into cell C5 and your BrightLocal API Secret will go into cell C7 which is the annotated step 2 and step 3 in the screenshot below:

BrightLocal and Kogneta Reviewalyzer

Get Business Directories

Now that you’re ready to connect with BrightLocal, the next step is to pull in all of the business directories that you’re able to analyze reviews from. To do this, click on the BrightLocal Reviews dropdown and select the Get Directories option.

BrightLocal and Kogneta Reviewalyzer
You’ll then start to see all of the business directories populate in the RAW – Config tab.

Enter Business Information

The next step is to start entering the information for all of the businesses that you want to pull reviews for. If you don’t know offhand which competitors you should be analyzing, then I highly recommend using BrightLocal’s Local Search Audit which will provide you with some of your top competitors.

Using the Businesses tab, fill in the information for each business that you want to pull reviews for in the white column (columns D to I). If I wanted to pull reviews on burger restaurants in New York City, it would look like this:

Reviewalyzer example



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