How is my copycat competitor getting so many Google reviews so quickly? earn by blogging adsense income

A former employee of ours has started their own copycat business - they copied our organizational structure, pricing schemes, and even some of the wording on our website until we asked them to stop!

We consistently rank #1 in Google SERP for most relevant keywords. Until recently this competitor wasn't ranking very well at all for these same keywords, and so we ignored them.

Over the past few months, they've started to accumulate Google reviews very quickly - for the 5 years we've been in business, we've accumulated about 15 reviews. Over the course of just 2 years the competitor now has about twice that, all glowing 5 star reviews. They also launched a site redesign, which in combination with the reviews, I suspect has helped them to climb the SERP. We're still outranking them, but I am not sure for how much longer.

My questions are:

1. Is there any chance that these reviews are authentic? I am sure that our customer base is much, much larger than theirs. Yet somehow they are getting several new reviews a week, while we struggle to get just a handful every year. We regularly solicit reviews from our clients, but as you know it is extremely difficult to get customers to write a public review without offering an incentive (we get plenty of private feedback). The only thing I can guess is that our copycat is pressuring customers in person to write a review on their phones at the end of each encounter. Alternatively they may be outright buying reviews from customers, or simply writing fake reviews for themselves with throwaway Google accounts. I suspect it is a mixture of all of these things.

2. Should I worry about this, or do anything about it? We're on top of our SEO game otherwise in terms of on-page, performance, and backlinks. Is it possible that despite all of this, our competitor could outrank us simply by accumulating more reviews?

My business is my livelihood, and I've thrown all of my time and energy into seeing that it grows and succeeds. My copycat, meanwhile, is doing this as a side gig and has a full-time job at a major corporation. I could be making a lot more money as a developer, but I love what I'm doing with my company and I don't want to see it ruined by this idiot (who we fired for doing some shady things with our clients, and may be doing shady things now with these reviews).

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