The city of Seattle, Washington has a rich and storied history when it comes to the automotive industry. From the arrival of the first "horseless carriage" on its streets in 1900 to its role as a hub for automotive manufacturing and innovation, Seattle has played an impactful part in the evolution of the car.
From the start, Seattle has embraced the auto industry. By 1907, the city boasted 16 car dealers, many of them clustered in the Pike/Pine neighborhood on Capitol Hill, an area that iconically became known as "Auto Row".
It was home to one of the first gasoline service stations in the world, opened in 1907, and played host to early automotive races and events, cementing its place in the center of car culture.
Over the years, Seattle has continued at the forefront of automotive innovation. Dealerships in the area showcase a strong commitment to the customer experience with high review response rates, elevated Google star ratings, and significant review volume.
Using the Online Reputation Index, we’ve identified and ranked the dealerships with the best online reputations in the Seattle area.
- South Tacoma Honda is the top-ranking dealership in Seattle. This dealer earned the best reputation by outperforming in relative monthly review volume. Higher monthly review volume = higher frequency of reviews, which translates to a better online reputation overall. South Tacoma Honda should continue to consistently generate reviews if it wants to maintain its top spot.
- Rairdon's Honda of Marysville and Rairdon's Honda of Burien secured the #2 and #3 spots, respectively. Despite this, both dealerships have the lowest review response rates among all dealers ranked. They would benefit from a more dedicated and active review response strategy, which would work to better engage customers and improve their brand images.
- Coming in #10, Lexus Of Tacoma at Fife is suppressed in the rankings due to its low monthly review volume. This dealer should ask for reviews at every point of contact with customers to improve its online reputation score and rise in the ranks.
- BMW Northwest secured the #1 spot for luxury dealers in Seattle due to its outstanding review response rate of 99% and high monthly review volume. This dealer is dedicated to generating and responding to reviews, which has successfully propelled it to the top.
- Ranking #2 is Lexus of Bellevue. Its high lifetime review volume has secured it one of the top spots. However, to have a shot at #1, this dealer needs to maintain its nearly perfect response rate while increasing monthly review volume.
- Audi Bellevue earned the #5 spot on the luxury list. This dealer has the lowest review response rate and could easily work to improve its online reputation by taking the time to respond to every review.
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South Tacoma Honda earns the #1 spot for non-luxury dealers in Seattle. With a nearly perfect overall reputation health score of 98%, this dealer outperforms competitors in every category, especially concerning lifetime and monthly review volumes.
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Way Scarff Ford earns the #9 spot on the list. This dealer has the only perfect review response rate of all dealers in Seattle. However, it's suppressed in the rankings due to having the lowest monthly review volume.
*Note from the editor. The Automotive Reputation Index offers substantial coverage of the nation’s dealerships, but it’s still growing. If your dealership is not yet listed on the Index and you’d like to add it, submit your information and we will add it during a regularly scheduled update, roughly once per month.
Widewail's rankings are based on the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index. Explore the full dataset:
Ranking Methodology
To rank these dealerships fairly, we chose a method that takes into account the fact that dealerships on our list receive a wide range of monthly review volume, in part due to varying levels of opportunity. For example, luxury brands simply can never sell as many cars as non-luxury brands, the price point limiting a luxury dealership's market.
To compare two dealerships with very different review volumes directly wouldn’t be fair. A dealer with two 5-star reviews doesn’t necessarily deserve to be ranked higher than a dealer with 200 reviews and a 4.5-star rating. With few reviews, the former doesn’t offer enough data for us to use to understand its performance. However, we couldn’t just ignore locations with very few reviews, as that would introduce bias into our rankings.
To solve this, we used "adjusted ratings" in our calculation of dealership ranking. In essence, "adjusted rating" is a dealership's star rating that takes into account how its review volume compares to that of other dealerships in that area. We calculated adjusted ratings by using a technique called additive smoothing which we explain below.
Additive Smoothing
The approach we’ve used is a form of what’s called “additive smoothing.” This process allows for an unbiased way to rank two otherwise unequal dealerships. At its core, additive smoothing levels the playing field by artificially increasing the number of reviews each dealership has by adding the same number of reviews of each star rating to every dealership.
Customer Engagement
Additionally, we take into account the percentage of reviews that a dealership has responded to in our calculation of ranking, as Widewail strongly believes that review response is indicative of a strong reputation strategy.
Activity
The last component revolves around how much review volume a dealership receives, which can be broken down into two parts - their lifetime volume and average monthly volume. Lifetime volume can be thought of as a popularity metric. It’s an important metric and one of the first numbers that a potential customer will see when they start looking at reviews. The second, average monthly review volume, is representative of how active the dealership currently is. We can think of it as follows, lifetime volume captures a historical view of the dealership whereas average volume gives insight into the current status. The final component for the volume metrics is to scale them so there is a more meaningful comparison. To do this we use what is known as min-max scaling. First, we group dealerships by their respective city and then find the dealership with the most volume and least volume. Then for each dealer in the group, we subtract the lowest volume and divide by the difference between the highest and lowest volume. The formula for this can be seen below.
x' = x - min(x)max(x) - min(x)
The main advantages of this approach are that all the volume metrics can be mapped to a value between 0 and 1 and the relative difference between dealership volumes can still be preserved.
Below we see an example of this where we have 9 dealerships with differing lifetime volumes, which we then scale. Notice that the relative distance between the actual volumes and the scaled versions is the same.
Below we have an example of ten dealerships, their review volume, and the adjusted relative volume. We can calculate the relative volume by sorting the dealers by review volume and determining the percentage of dealers that have fewer reviews. Here we see that dealer D had the most reviews and so they get a score of 1.
|
Lifetime Volume
|
Scaled Volume
|
|
4619
|
1
|
|
4065
|
0.88
|
|
3922
|
0.85
|
|
1783
|
0.38
|
|
1001
|
0.21
|
|
810
|
0.17
|
|
164
|
0.03
|
|
101
|
0.02
|
|
22
|
0
|
The Ranking Formula
(adjusted rating / 5) * 0.3 + (response rate) * 0.3 + (lifetime volume) * 0.15 + (avg monthly volume) * 0.25
Weighting Rational
We chose to weigh each feature as follows: adjusted rating accounts for 30% of the overall score, response rate also accounts for 30%, and review volume is 40%, which is further broken down into lifetime volume (15%) and average monthly volume (25%).
Weight selection is based on Widewail’s depth of expertise in the industry and we believe is a fair representation of what should be considered a standout reputation.
We’ve broken the weighs into three categories:
Activity (40%)
We believe the amount of review activity is the most important indicator of reputation health for a business, and is a leading driver of local search rankings. We’ve broken this category into two components: lifetime volume (15%) and frequency (25%). Lifetime volume is our “popularity” metric.
Engagement (30%)
Engaging with customers by responding to reviews is a key component of a healthy reputation.
Quality (30%)
The rating has a substantial impact on if a business shows up in local search and if that business is entered into a prospect’s consideration set. Rating is a key identifier of business health.
Calculation Details
If a company has an adjusted rating of 4.2, responds to 10% of their reviews and has an adjusted lifetime volume of 0.90 in their city and 0.87 for their scaled average monthly review volume, then we would calculate their overall rating as follows
(4.2 / 5) * 0.3 + (0.1)*0.3 + (0.9)*0.15 + (0.87)*0.25 = 0.252 + 0.03 + 0.135 + 0.2175 = 0.6345 * 100 = 63.45
Note: Since response rate accounts for 30% of the overall ranking, if a dealer doesn’t respond to any reviews that automatically caps the max value they can receive to 70.
