Before we write a single word of copy for a client's website, we do something that most web designers don't bother with: we read their competitors' reviews. All of them. The five-star ones and the one-star ones, the enthusiastic and the disappointed.
It takes an hour. It's free. And it consistently produces the most valuable insights of our entire research process — because reviews are the closest thing to unfiltered customer truth that exists on the public internet.
What you're actually looking for
You're not reading reviews to enjoy your competitors' failures. You're mining them for two things:
The complaints. When customers leave negative reviews, they describe the gap between what they expected and what they got. That gap is your opportunity. If three competitors in your market have reviews mentioning "slow response times," "didn't feel like they understood my brief," or "handed off to someone junior" — those are problems you can solve, and solve visibly on your website.
The praise. Positive reviews tell you what customers actually value — often in language they'd never use in a formal brief. "They just got it without me having to explain twice." "Felt like they genuinely cared about the outcome." "Much more affordable than we expected." These phrases reveal what matters to your market, often in ways that surprise you.
A real example (anonymised)
When we worked with a Cambridge-based coaching practice, we read reviews for the five most visible coaching businesses in the area. A clear pattern emerged in the negative reviews across multiple competitors:
"Felt like a generic programme that could have been for anyone — not specific to my situation at all."
1-star review, competing coaching practice"Expensive for what it was. The sessions felt formulaic rather than personalised."
2-star review, competing coaching practiceBoth reviews point to the same unmet need: personalisation. So we structured our client's website around exactly that — her bespoke, one-to-one methodology, her approach to understanding each client before any session structure is agreed, the discovery process she uses. The word "personalised" appears in the headline. Not because we invented it — because her competitors' customers told us it mattered.
How to do this yourself
- Identify your 5–8 closest competitors. The ones you actually lose work to, or would if a customer chose not to use you.
- Read their Google reviews, Trustpilot, Facebook reviews — wherever they have a meaningful volume (30+ reviews gives you something to work with).
- Keep a running list of complaints and praise. Group them into themes as you go. After 50–100 reviews, patterns emerge clearly.
- Ask yourself: which of these complaints can we genuinely address? Don't promise what you can't deliver — but if you can solve a problem your competitors consistently fail on, make it visible on your website.
- Steal the language of the praise. The words real customers use to describe what they loved are almost always better than anything a copywriter invents. Use them in your headlines, your service descriptions, your testimonial callouts.
Why this feeds into everything
The insights from competitor review analysis don't just improve your website copy. They inform your service design (what do customers want that nobody is delivering?), your pricing communication (what do people complain is unclear?), your guarantee or trust signals (what makes people nervous before booking?), and your FAQs (what questions keep coming up in reviews?).
It's one of the most time-efficient research methods we know — an hour of reading that shapes months of marketing decisions. We do it at the start of every project, and we'd encourage you to do it too, whether or not you're planning a new website.