Press release: 24/01/2022 

Dust-Control-Industry-eKomi-StarInsights

We are thrilled to announce that Global Road Technology has been awarded as the “Industry Leader” and the “Most Reviewed” company in the dust control and dust suppression market in Australia. 

Introduction

eKomi, the world’s largest provider of user-validated ratings and reviews, has released its 2021 StarInsights™, an exclusive report on the digital presence and consumer feedback of the top dust control and suppression company’s in Australia. After weeks of intensive research, eKomi’s team of consumer-review experts have compared the last performance of these dust suppression companies across factors such as customer reviews and ratings, online visibility, Google rankings, and website traffic.

Dust Control & Dust Suppression Market Overview

Over the past 12 to 18 months, there has been a rollout of more stringent dust legislation across all States and Territories in Australia. Now is the time to decide whether your dust suppression provider is the best choice, or perhaps you need to switch to a new one to meet the strict regulations. eKomi is glad to present you with a fresh overview of the market based on dust suppression companies’ ratings. Dust suppression providers are not only faced with the challenge of compliance to regulated dust limits but also have the onus to save lives from dust-related lung diseases which are often fatal. Proactive dust suppression and management are more important than just monitoring alone because dealing with dust at its source is imperative to save lives. Exposure to dust in mining activities poses both occupational and non-occupational risks, hence effective dust suppression extends health and safety to mine workers, their families at home, and communities within the vicinity of mining operations.

The health and safety of all concerned depend on the effective mining dust suppression services and the value for the client comes through the ability to deliver a positive customer experience and in the process save many lives. Dust suppression has evolved from a traditional utility service with water alone to a tailored and innovative process utilizing the best solutions to deal with dust at its source and improve operational efficiency. Areas of concern include haul roads, stockpiles, veneering, drilling and blasting, material handling just to mention but a few. This means that mining dust suppression is more complex than ever and requires detailed advisory services, expertise, a genuine duty of care, and greater customer-centricity. Australia has a very competitive dust suppression service provider market, especially in the mining industry. The top dust suppression industry players in this market include:

Pre-COVID-19, this industry has predominantly relied on boots on the ground with business development managers and engineers visiting mine sites across Australia to propose the right product for the dust issue. However, the pandemic has forced a dramatic acceleration, both in the speed of change and the required investment in digital transformation. With severe interstate border restrictions, adapting to a digital model became a major necessity for these dust suppression providers to stay relevant and thrive.

eKomi: Most Reviewed Dust Suppression Companies Australia

Just as positive ratings and reviews are crucial to a company’s success, they also provide a relatively reliable indicator of the quality of products and services offered. With that correlation in mind, eKomi’s StarInsights™ study examined the TOP dust suppression providers and aggregated their reviews across several platforms including Google, Facebook, Ekomi, Glassdoor, etc.

Global Road Technology (GRT) is Australia’s dust suppression industry leader for this edition of eKomi’s StarInsights. With 1288 reviews collected, GRT is above and beyond the rest of its competition. None of the other competitors is even close to the review numbers that GRT has achieved. The next best on the list is Vital Chemicals with 14 reviews followed by RST solutions with 11. The rest of the players have less than 5 overall reviews. Looking at average ratings, Rainstorm has the perfect 5/5 rating, however, it has only 4 reviews while GRT has an impressive 4.88 average rating across 1288 reviews collected. Even Vital Chemicals outperforms RST and cements second place with an average rating of 4.87 across 14 reviews.

GRT has been very active in not only collecting reviews but also dominating across all the top platforms. They are also very popular on Ekomi’s review platform and several other platforms such as Local Search, Yellow Pages, Trustpilot, etc. GRT also managed to achieve impressive employee reviews on Glassdoor, while the rest of the players have an insignificant presence.

“If these dust suppression providers hope to compete online, they’ll need to make a concerted effort to start collecting customer ratings and reviews over the next 12 months,” commented Michael Ambros, eKomi Founder, and CEO. Research shows that nearly a fifth of customers return to a provider and even become loyal customers when a business acknowledges and takes care of their bad experience. We would recommend every business work with negative reviews and derive value from them. It is especially beneficial for companies with ratings below 4,5 and high review-collection rates. When a company is effectively collecting consumer feedback, a low rating shows that there is room for improvement in customer service.

Online Visibility & Perceptual Mapping

The Online search visibility score is the percentage of clicks a website receives based on the organic ranking positions, across all of the keywords that a website is competing for. Search visibility score gives an overview of how well a website is performing in the organic search results on Google. The Visibility index is based on click-through rate (CTR) that shows a website’s progress in Google’s top 100 search results. A 0% visibility means that the domain isn’t ranking in Google’s top 100 results for any of these keywords, and a 100% visibility means that the domain keeps the first position in the SERP for all of these keywords. With that correlation in mind, eKomi’s StarInsights™ study examined the online visibility of the TOP dust suppression websites and projected them on a perceptual map to highlight the positioning of these websites on Google.

Global Road Technology clearly dominates Google search performance with an online visibility score of 54.01% while the next best player is at only 9.58%. The rest of the players in this space are all below 10% with Vital Industries having the least score of 0.24%.

GRT is ranking at the top of Google search results for more than 30 keywords and outperforming the rest of the players by a huge margin. Dustaside, Spraygrass, RST, and Rainstorm are closing competing in the middle grid for 20+ keywords with an average Google ranking position of 40.

Overall traffic and Google ranking distribution

Ranking distribution is an overview of rankings a website has in Google’s top 3, top 10, and top 20 and top 100 organic results. Online reviews and online visibility scores clearly indicate who leads the charts when it comes to overall traffic and ranking distribution. GRT has over 31 search result rankings in Google’s top 3, 36 in the top 10, and 38 in the top 20. Dustaside, Spraygrass, and RST have only around 20 search result rankings in Google’s top 100.

Semrush offers an estimated traffic score for all the keywords tracked. According to Semrush, users will click on a domain’s search result depending on this domain’s position in the SERP, multiplied by the keyword’s Volume and divided by 30 (number of days in a month). This gives us the estimated traffic score for a website. As GRT dominates the Google search results, it has a traffic score of 35.22 while the next best competitor Dustaside has a score of only 10.02. “We’ve seen time and again, across a wide range of sectors, that brands who activate their reviews and ratings see a dramatic leap in search engine-referred traffic, and a corresponding boost in revenue,” commented Michael Ambros, eKomi Founder, and CEO. He further says “This research clearly calls out the impact that reviews and ratings can have on a company’s success, regardless of its size or advertising budget.”

The Crucial Importance of Ratings and Reviews

As many merchants now recognize, customer ratings and reviews are absolutely essential for success in the online marketplace – especially when those scores are integrated into Google search results. Although a comprehensive, user-friendly website is obviously crucial, public reviews build trust before visitors even click the site’s link, significantly increasing its chances of receiving traffic.

Reviews and ratings also boost revenue-generating activity and inspire even more positive reviews – setting off a “virtuous cycle” in which a well-reviewed website’s popularity continues to skyrocket. Poor reviews, on the other hand, can set off a downward spiral: a site’s sudden disappearance from top search results can abruptly destroy its customer base. With the increased use of mobile and a digital boom during the pandemic in 2021, the power of online search has continued to grow and so has the impact of user reviews.

As per 2021 online reviews research –

* 89% of customers won’t take action until they read reviews.
* 15% of users don’t trust businesses without reviews.

If users like your brand they will listen to you, but if they trust your brand, they will do business with you. This makes it clear that publicly visible feedback from real customers is a key component in a merchant’s success. And as Google’s search algorithms grow ever smarter, positive reviews and ratings are becoming especially vital in the heated competition for those all-important “above-the-fold” natural search rankings.

Conclusion

 

GRT is a clear winner of the eKomi StarInsights 2021 award for its sheer dominance in online reviews and Google search performance. GRT clearly outperforms the rest of the players by a huge margin and emerges as a leader in the digital space for the dust control and dust suppression category. We reached out to the GRT team to understand the reasons behind their incredible reviews and ratings. “GRT has been an industry leader in innovative engineering technology, and our incredible team of chartered engineers, polymers chemists, geotechnical experts, and dedicated client success managers have enabled us to deliver exceptional results for our mining customers,” commented Troy Adams, Managing Director of GRT.

He further adds “We have been extremely proactive in adapting to the digital trends to serve our client’s needs in the mining industry. We launched several industry-first online projects this year including – the online marketplace and Q&A collaboration series. We made it a habit to publish weekly industry articles on our website, post every day on our socials, and engage regularly with our customers and the wider mining community” GRT has global operations, but GRT Australia’s yearly turnover alone is worth more than 9.5 Million Euros. Over the years, our eKomi team has been constantly stressing the impact customer engagement and feedback collection have on the success of a business. GRT’s performance once again proves this point. We highly recommend collecting online reviews and increasing the digital presence of the rest of the players in this market in order to stay relevant to the rapidly evolving consumer needs and digital preferences.

Source: eKomi StarInsights 2021