People have plenty of online channels to express their opinions: review platforms, social media, digital media, company websites, blogs, you name it. For businesses, this feedback can make or break their success. That’s where reputation management software comes into play.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how you can leverage the power of DataForSEO APIs to develop your own cutting-edge reputation management tool. Let’s dive in!
Contents:
Introduction to Reputation Management Software
Understanding APIs for Reputation Management
Designing Reputation Management Software and its Key Features
Introduction to Reputation Management Software
Reputation management software is designed to help users monitor and analyze various aspects of their brand’s online visibility, such as reviews, mentions from the web, and/or social media.
By gathering information about customer feedback and online conversations around a business, the software assists users in improving brand image while reducing the number of tasks that need to be done manually.
For example, a reputation management tool can help a user quickly notice that their restaurant is continuously receiving complaints about slow delivery from various online sources. Having identified the issue, they can take steps to improve the service by hiring more delivery staff to meet the demand.
Sure enough, the user could have checked the restaurant’s reviews on Google Business Profile, Yelp, Tripadvisor, and a bunch of popular local newspapers manually, but it would take much longer. Now imagine if a person manages a whole franchise with 10 different locations. Collecting information for a quality report on reputation would probably take ages.
In contrast, reputation management software can instantly provide clear reports, indicate key performance metrics across any required number of tracked sources, and highlight areas that require improvement. That is why reputation management software is an essential tool for any business looking to quickly address negative feedback and maintain a good reputation online.
As you understand, data pulled from various customer feedback sources is at the heart of reputation management software, so in the next part, we’ll talk in more detail about data collection and solutions that speed up this process.
Understanding APIs for Reputation Management
Reputation management software revolves around data. And while data is widely available on the web, it has to go a long way before it reaches a software user in an understandable form.
Let’s say you want to check Tripadvisor reviews of a restaurant owned by a famous Ukrainian chef Klopotenko. Once you land on this page, you’ll surely notice that it contains much more information than just an average rating and reviews listed one after another.
As a human being, you can quickly determine which part of the information is valuable to you at the moment. However, if you were running a bot, like a search engine crawler, it wouldn’t know that, so it’d collect all information that is available on the page. Then, you’d need to store the data somewhere, run another program to process it, pick the necessary data points, and structure the data. After that, you’d need to store the processed information and connect it to your software so it can be displayed in a meaningful form of charts and tables.
This is generally the case when you are opting for data collection through the means of scraping. However, there is an easier option that only requires establishing a connection with your tool – it’s called API.
How do APIs Work?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. In a nutshell, it’s a set of protocols and routines that define how different software systems communicate to exchange data. The majority of web-based services utilize REST APIs that work by getting requests from client software and sending responses back to it.
To use an API, you usually need to get an API key or a token for authorization. Then, you should consult the API documentation to know how to specify your requests. Finally, you can start making API calls.
Check out DataForSEO API Explorer: a handy way to test APIs >>
APIs have become increasingly important in software development, allowing for easy integration of different functionalities. By using these solutions, developers can build more powerful and complex software without reinventing the wheel.
When it comes to reputation management software, several widely known APIs may come in handy.
Review Monitoring APIs
Review Monitoring APIs allow businesses to track and monitor customer feedback by pulling data from various review platforms.
For example, with Google Business Profile APIs, Trustpilot API, and Yelp Fusion API, you can retrieve and respond to customer reviews for the profile you own, and get detailed information about your profile’s reviews, such as the rating, review text, and date of the review.
Brand Mention Monitoring APIs
These APIs are designed for gathering mentions of a brand or product across the web, providing valuable insights into the brand reputation and customer sentiment.
Since brand mentions need to be collected from all kinds of different websites, there is no universal official data source for this purpose. However, you can easily find plenty of commercially available APIs that differ by rate limits, system stability, price, and other factors.
Examples include Brandwatch, Sprout Social, and DataForSEO’s Content Analysis API.
Social Media Monitoring APIs
These APIs allow businesses to collect data from social media and similar platforms.
- Twitter API: monitor mentions, tweets, hashtags, and more.
- Facebook Graph API: monitor post engagements, likes, comments, shares, and more.
- Reddit API: monitor subreddits, posts, comments, upvotes, etc.
As you can see, there are plenty of API solutions providing online reputation data.
Note that each API has its restrictions which you should thoroughly explore in advance. The constraints of official APIs generally include rate limitation, high cost, complicated token access procedure, and differences in the data structure, which makes it rather challenging to apply these APIs in software development.
However, there are also commercial third-party APIs designed specifically for that purpose.
When choosing a data provider, make sure you partner with a reputable company that offers a reliable and ethical API service, accurate data, and reasonable pricing.
DataForSEO APIs for Reputation Management
DataForSEO is a leading provider of data for the marketing technology industry. A significant part of our data offering is focused on reputation management.
In particular, you can leverage the following APIs for opinion mining on brands and products:
DataForSEO Reviews API supports the largest customer feedback sources on the web: Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, Amazon, Tripadvisor, Google Play, and App Store.
The details you can get include the review’s text, star rating, time of submission, reviewer info, owner’s response, attached images, and more.
You can get more information about DataForSEO Reviews APIs and their functionality potential in this article.
DataForSEO Content Analysis API is designed to help you gain a deeper understanding of the consumer mindset by quickly obtaining sentiment insights from web mentions.
It supports over 70 languages, scores positive, negative, and neutral polarity in any text discovered by your target keyword, and measures emotional reactions.
Learn more about sentiment analysis and utilization of DataForSEO APIs for brand management projects from this blog post.
Now that we’ve learned the basics and some examples of APIs for reputation management, let’s dive deeper into the process of building your software.
Designing Reputation Management Software and its Key Features
The development of a quality reputation management tool requires a deep understanding of key software aspects and features that will help businesses and individuals effectively manage their brand’s reputation. In this part, we’ll explore the key software components, and take a look at some example dashboards that enable users to streamline their brand management process.
To begin with, let’s quickly go through the main sections of reputation management software you should consider including in your roadmap.
1 Review monitoring.
This essential part of reputation management software provides users with instruments for tracking and analyzing customer reviews and ratings from multiple sources. Review monitoring dashboards typically furnish aggregated stats on review volume and rating along with the breakdown by platform and a progress timeline. Popular examples of review monitoring solutions include ReviewTrackers, BirdEye, and Trustpilot.
2 Brand mention & sentiment monitoring.
Brand mention monitoring instruments collect stats on target keyword citations from various websites, forums, and comments. They keep users informed about customer feedback, industry trends, and competition by providing data on the volume of mentions, sentiment distribution, insights into mention sources, and target audiences. Examples of web mention monitoring tools include Mention, Brand24, and BuzzSumo.
3 Social media monitoring.
Social monitoring or social listening functionality displays information on mentions of a brand, product, or important keywords from social media platforms. Comprehensive social listening dashboards usually surface mentions, hashtags, influencers, and analytics while giving insights into social media trends, audience preferences, and sentiment toward the brand. Here are some well-known social listening tools: Sprout Social, Hootsuite Insights, and Brandwatch.
Sure enough, the development of full-fledged reputation management software takes time. However, the key is knowing where to start.
That is why we’re suggesting you take a look at the core reputation management dashboards which will allow you to assemble a minimum viable product. We hope the examples below will help you to get a sound understanding of the main software features and create an actionable development plan.
To closely examine necessary DataForSEO API endpoints and parameters for each feature, please refer to our open guide to building a reputation management tool.
Key Review Monitoring Features
A Review Monitoring dashboard should provide users with smooth and efficient feedback management functionality by visualizing a range of data related to a business’s reviews and ratings.
In particular, it is vital to track the following data:
- Review volume – total number of reviews received across all tracked platforms.
- Rating – the average rating based on all reviews.
- Source – the source where each review was posted.
- Reviewer information – reviewer name, profile picture, etc.
- Response status – whether the review has been responded to or needs a response.
- Trend analysis – review volume and rating over time.
To make these data points more meaningful for users, you can organize them into several features:
1 All-time Rating and Reviews indicating the average star rating and total reviews received for a certain business from all tracked sources.
2 Reviews by Star Rating with the distribution of customer reviews from different sources by rating.
3 Reviews Over Time containing all essential data on customer reviews from the tracked platforms, including review text, rating, and date when the review was published, and showing whether the business’s owner responded to a relevant review.
4 Rating by Source charts illustrating the distribution of reviews from a particular review platform broken down by star rating.
5 Reviews by Source and Date with the number of reviews that came from each tracked platform in the last 30 days, this month, last month, and this year.
Using DataForSEO Reviews API, you can easily obtain all necessary data points to visualize the features illustrated above.
Here’s an example cURL request for retrieving Yelp reviews.
# Instead of 'login' and 'password' use your credentials from https://app.dataforseo.com/api-dashboard
login="login"
password="password"
cred="$(printf ${login}:${password} | base64)"
curl --location --request POST "https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/business_data/yelp/reviews/task_post"
--header "Authorization: Basic ${cred}"
--header "Content-Type: application/json"
--data-raw "[
{
"language_name": "English",
"alias": "vatos-urban-tacos-singapore",
"depth": 50,
"sort_by": "highest_rating"
}
]"
The next step after sending POST requests is making a corresponding GET request and using the reviews_count field from the API response.
{
"version": "0.1.20210917",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0395 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "11121746-1535-0305-0000-bdd2273995fc",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "0.0154 sec.",
"cost": 0,
"result_count": 1,
"path": [
"v3",
"business_data",
"yelp",
"reviews",
"task_get",
"11121746-1535-0305-0000-bdd2273995fc"
],
"data": {
"se_type": "reviews",
"se": "yelp",
"api": "business_data",
"function": "reviews",
"language_name": "English",
"alias": "vatos-urban-tacos-singapore",
"depth": 10,
"sort_by": "highest_rating",
"device": "desktop",
"os": "windows"
},
"result": [
{
"keyword": "vatos-urban-tacos-singapore",
"alias": "vatos-urban-tacos-singapore",
"type": "yelp_reviews",
"se_domain": "yelp.com",
"location_code": null,
"language_code": "en",
"check_url": "https://yelp.com/biz/vatos-urban-tacos-singapore?q=&sort_by=rating_desc&rl=en",
"datetime": "2021-11-12 15:47:05 +00:00",
"title": "Vatos Urban Tacos",
"rating": {
"rating_type": "Max5",
"value": 4,
"votes_count": 93,
"rating_max": 5
},
"reviews_count": 88,
"items_count": 10,
"items": [
{
"type": "yelp_reviews_search",
"rank_group": 1,
"rank_absolute": 1,
"position": "left",
"review_id": "-cX5dBhFxbQPsb0QxPWydA",
"rating": {
"rating_type": "Max5",
"value": 5,
"votes_count": null,
"rating_max": null
},
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T00:00:00",
"review_text": "Greta place to come chill but now can only takeaway. Can try it out if you are keen in Mexican food especially their beef taco. Can't wait to go back again after ccircuit breaker",
"review_images": null,
"user_profile": {
"name": "Fiona Y.",
"url": "https://yelp.com/user_details?userid=ONgb4F0PSB9DJ-69htUi2g",
"image_url": "https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/photo/Uo18I7DuJtYXHnInMVm8pQ/60s.jpg",
"location": null,
"reviews_count": null
},
"responses": null
},
{
"type": "yelp_reviews_search",
"rank_group": 2,
"rank_absolute": 2,
"position": "left",
"review_id": "3ncbQ2H6wt1Gk7h-Ozd8nQ",
"rating": {
"rating_type": "Max5",
"value": 5,
"votes_count": null,
"rating_max": null
},
"timestamp": "2019-06-26T00:00:00",
"review_text": "Mexican food in Singapore? Yes absolutely Yes! If it's what your craving this is the place. Chips and salsa. Drinks and the food is good. Loved the salsa.",
"review_images": null,
"user_profile": {
"name": "M J.",
"url": "https://yelp.com/user_details?userid=uNmmjpJyy3ler9CR9-4Jmw",
"image_url": "https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/photo/pVMkKglSaFzLS3_lVCbdvQ/60s.jpg",
"location": null,
"reviews_count": null
},
"responses": null
},
{
"type": "yelp_reviews_search",
"rank_group": 3,
"rank_absolute": 3,
"position": "left",
"review_id": "w4Mciz3N2qCbgImfUpc61w",
"rating": {
"rating_type": "Max5",
"value": 5,
"votes_count": null,
"rating_max": null
},
"timestamp": "2019-05-13T00:00:00",
"review_text": "Well, Yelp never lets me down. Came to Vatos for dinner after needing a break from hawker stalls so I browsed Yelp and that's where we ended up.
My bf and I shared 3 orders of two tacos each- the beef brisket, pork belly, and fish tacos. They were all very delicious and although the taco tortilla appeared small, they were stacked to the sky with protein. It's not a very traditional Mexican place- because those places usually do two tortillas per taco, but I enjoyed these tacos thoroughly and I would come back if I ever visited Singapore again!",
"review_images": null,
"user_profile": {
"name": "Cecilia T.",
"url": "https://yelp.com/user_details?userid=ZBllYKrFzaI0I7v6Wl26Wg",
"image_url": "https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/photo/q8P1ycymqL0BU2KPK_iFig/60s.jpg",
"location": null,
"reviews_count": null
},
"responses": null
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
To display aggregated stats, calculate the sum of values from reviews_count for all sources and calculate the percentage of reviews coming from each platform.
See more details in this section of our open guide.
Key Brand Mention & Sentiment Monitoring Features
Brand Mention & Sentiment Monitoring dashboard should offer businesses a comprehensive online reputation rundown by providing clear stats of their brand, product, and service mentions from the web and associated sentiment.
Users should be able to observe these key data points:
- Mention volume – the overall number of mentions a brand received from all monitored sources.
- Mention sentiment – identification of sentiment polarity for each mention as positive, negative, or neutral. Identification of emotional reactions (such as anger, happiness, love, sadness, etc) will be a great competitive advantage.
- Mention source – the source for each mention, including both the domain and a particular URL where the keyword is used.
- Geographical distribution – mention volume broken down by countries.
- Trend analysis – fluctuations in mention volume over time.
- Competitor analysis – comparison of brand data with competitor data.
- Engagement metrics – data on social media interactions associated with the content where the mention is found.
You can represent this data as the following set of features:
1 Web Mentions Overview – offer all key details about the mentions of the target keywords they entered, such as rating, sentiment, category, the snippet of each mention, and the total number of mentions.
2 Mentions by Country – highlight which countries mention the user’s target keywords more.
3 Mentions by Language – give users a peek into the languages most frequently used to cite their target keywords.
4 Sentiment Summary – show the correlation between the number of positive, negative, and neutral mentions, while also providing the distribution of mentions by emotions within each polarity.
5 Sentiment by Rating – illustrate the distribution of sentiment polarity by rating.
6 Sentiment Over Time – plot the proportion and fluctuations of positive, neutral, and negative sentiment in a user’s mentions over the indicated date range.
7 Sentiment Over Time by Category – provide users with the overall sentiment trends in the selected category(-ies).
With DataForSEO Content Analysis API, you can collect all essential data to build key Brand Mention and Sentiment monitoring features hassle-free.
# Instead of 'login' and 'password' use your credentials from https://app.dataforseo.com/api-dashboard
login="login"
password="password"
cred="$(printf ${login}:${password} | base64)"
curl --location --request POST "https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/content_analysis/phrase_trends/live"
--header "Authorization: Basic ${cred}"
--header "Content-Type: application/json"
--data-raw "[
{
"keyword": "logitech",
"search_mode": "as_is",
"date_from": "2022-09-01",
"date_group": "month"
}
]"
The stats you receive in the API response will be grouped by a specific date. You should use data on the number of mentions from the connotation_types object and relevant dates for this chart.
{
"version": "0.1.20220819",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "19.4363 sec.",
"cost": 0.02009,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "11091159-1535-0467-0000-7de6f8a2cd19",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "19.3880 sec.",
"cost": 0.02009,
"result_count": 3,
"path": [
"v3",
"content_analysis",
"phrase_trends",
"live"
],
"data": {
"api": "content_analysis",
"function": "phrase_trends",
"keyword": "logitech",
"search_mode": "as_is",
"date_from": "2022-09-01",
"date_group": "month"
},
"result": [
{
"type": "content_analysis_trends",
"date": "2022-09-01",
"total_count": 1159252,
"rank": 590,
"top_domains": [
{
"domain": "xsplit.com",
"count": 53678
},
{
"domain": "englishsteps.net",
"count": 26359
},
{
"domain": "wireless1.com.au",
"count": 13768
},
{
"domain": "16bars.de",
"count": 8075
},
{
"domain": "bcoolmagazin.hu",
"count": 7615
},
{
"domain": "maistecnologia.com",
"count": 6352
},
{
"domain": "seattlestreetcar.org",
"count": 5923
},
{
"domain": "dutchcreativeindustry.com",
"count": 5891
},
{
"domain": "reviewsguide.org",
"count": 4195
},
{
"domain": "urank.ru",
"count": 3902
}
],
"sentiment_connotations": {
"anger": 33,
"happiness": 32457,
"love": 4976,
"sadness": 290,
"share": 33841,
"fun": 1212
},
"connotation_types": {
"positive": 390289,
"negative": 135916,
"neutral": 589516
},
"text_categories": [
{
"category": null,
"count": 138579
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10019,
10167
],
"count": 112695
},
{
"category": [
10019,
10167,
10007,
13418
],
"count": 55421
},
{
"category": [
10019,
10167,
10013
],
"count": 50413
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10108,
13691
],
"count": 47466
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10004
],
"count": 31977
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10108
],
"count": 29651
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10108,
10584
],
"count": 20540
},
{
"category": [
10108,
13691,
10013,
10103,
10556
],
"count": 19429
},
{
"category": [
10004,
10013
],
"count": 16576
}
],
"page_categories": [
{
"category": null,
"count": 297216
},
{
"category": [
10014,
10114,
10108
],
"count": 54264
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10108,
10584
],
"count": 24245
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10019,
10167
],
"count": 12532
},
{
"category": [
10108,
10584,
10013
],
"count": 11249
},
{
"category": [
10019,
10167,
10013
],
"count": 9711
},
{
"category": [
10019,
10167,
10009,
10404
],
"count": 7441
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10108
],
"count": 7435
},
{
"category": [
10108,
10013
],
"count": 6574
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10021,
10176,
13779
],
"count": 6109
}
],
"page_types": {
"blogs": 622032,
"organization": 118086,
"news": 230980,
"message-boards": 18590,
"ecommerce": 96451
},
"countries": {
"US": 86504,
"WW": 56826,
"DE": 30522,
"IN": 21831,
"VN": 20049,
"AU": 19544,
"BR": 16685,
"JP": 16651,
"GB": 16405,
"ES": 15335
},
"languages": {
"en": 712751,
"ja": 114912,
"de": 63841,
"es": 60616,
"fr": 53833,
"it": 27394,
"vi": 23817,
"ru": 16528,
"pt": 11518,
"hu": 8393
}
},
{
"type": "content_analysis_trends",
"date": "2022-10-01",
"total_count": 1430023,
"rank": 613,
"top_domains": [
{
"domain": "vdsitsolutions.com",
"count": 341567
},
{
"domain": "dutchcreativeindustry.com",
"count": 34616
},
{
"domain": "wireless1.com.au",
"count": 25600
},
{
"domain": "richardcastle.net",
"count": 8217
},
{
"domain": "edenred.mx",
"count": 8196
},
{
"domain": "private-sextreffen.cc",
"count": 7867
},
{
"domain": "parkkitchen.com",
"count": 7406
},
{
"domain": "16bars.de",
"count": 7337
},
{
"domain": "x-kom.pl",
"count": 7001
},
{
"domain": "kreativdesign1.de",
"count": 6131
}
],
"sentiment_connotations": {
"anger": 9,
"happiness": 36007,
"love": 4062,
"sadness": 128,
"share": 52651,
"fun": 971
},
"connotation_types": {
"positive": 735206,
"negative": 175341,
"neutral": 468693
},
"text_categories": [
{
"category": [
10019,
10167,
10168,
10883,
12184,
10007,
11506,
12168
],
"count": 262712
},
{
"category": null,
"count": 119642
},
{
"category": [
10019,
10167,
10872,
10007,
11506,
12168
],
"count": 66173
},
{
"category": [
10001,
10024,
10185,
10952,
13573
],
"count": 31464
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10019,
10167
],
"count": 22904
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10019,
10167,
10108,
13691
],
"count": 22363
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10108,
13691
],
"count": 21340
},
{
"category": [
10019,
10168,
10886,
12222,
12216,
10108
],
"count": 19754
},
{
"category": [
10108,
10001,
13655,
13656,
10016,
10139,
10746
],
"count": 19439
},
{
"category": [
10019,
10167,
10013,
10007,
13418
],
"count": 17741
}
],
"page_categories": [
{
"category": null,
"count": 213366
},
{
"category": [
10108,
13647,
10013,
10105,
13536,
10566,
13897,
13700
],
"count": 24725
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10108,
10584
],
"count": 18093
},
{
"category": [
10009,
10404,
10004,
13804
],
"count": 9602
},
{
"category": [
10108,
10584,
10013
],
"count": 8787
},
{
"category": [
10108,
13647,
13700
],
"count": 7707
},
{
"category": [
10013,
10019,
10167
],
"count": 7074
},
{
"category": [
10019,
10167,
10013
],
"count": 6302
},
{
"category": [
10009,
10404,
10019,
10167,
10017,
10142,
10769,
12067
],
"count": 5648
},
{
"category": [
10019,
10167,
10007,
10878,
13381,
12161,
13054
],
"count": 5625
}
],
"page_types": {
"blogs": 809466,
"organization": 44189,
"news": 256351,
"message-boards": 26910,
"ecommerce": 137036
},
"countries": {
"BE": 344693,
"US": 90030,
"WW": 68847,
"DE": 42458,
"AU": 32590,
"VN": 24763,
"PL": 21004,
"IN": 19569,
"BR": 18502,
"MX": 14819
},
"languages": {
"en": 963542,
"ja": 112659,
"de": 82151,
"es": 80681,
"fr": 57705,
"vi": 33349,
"it": 25147,
"pl": 9751,
"nl": 6994,
"nb": 6684
}
}
]
}
]
}
If you wish to empower this feature with data on several keywords, make separate API requests for each term, and calculate the sum of mentions for the same date within identical connotation_types for all keywords.
Visit the Brand Monitoring section of our open guide for more precise instructions on how to develop each feature based on DataForSEO Content Analysis API.
Recap
Reputation management software saves businesses an enormous amount of time by providing efficient instruments and rich data from numerous sources within a single interface.
Accordingly, when it comes to developing software for online reputation management, data from sources like review sites, blogs, and social media is the key component.
It will help you to create meaningful dashboards with quality features for review monitoring, brand mention & sentiment monitoring, and social media monitoring.
By integrating API technology into your software, you can access a wealth of structured data to empower these features.
Besides that, by finding a single provider that covers a large number of sources, you can minimize integration time and simplify data blending.
For example, with DataForSEO Reviews API and Content Analysis API, you can get customer feedback data from Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, Amazon, Tripadvisor, Google Play, and App Store as well as obtain brand mentions and sentiment analysis data from all over the web.
Visit our open guide to building reputation management software to review comprehensive dashboard examples along with the complete lists of DataForSEO API and parameters needed to build each feature.