The twenty tattoo studios someone searching in Edina is shown carry a median star rating of 5. No other trade measured around this town has a median that high: dentists, med spas and gyms sit at 4.9, barbershops and hair salons at 4.8, restaurants at 4.7, nail salons at 4.5. In tattoo work here, the star rating is not sorting anybody.
What does separate these studios is how much has been written about them. The median studio carries 77 Google reviews. The three most-reviewed hold 617, 477 and 380. Those same three studios are the ones that show up in our reading as the strongest repliers in the trade.
Rowan Southdale Center has answered 10 of its last 10 reviews and carries 617 reviews in total. Ocean Blue Tattoo & Art Studio has also answered 10 of its last 10, against 380 reviews. Jackalope Tattoo has answered 3 of its last 10, with 477 reviews on file. Those are the best reply records we found in the group, and we publish no figure for the other studios.
For scale: we read 460 businesses across every trade around Edina, and of the 56 measured on reply behaviour, a typical one had answered 72% of its recent reviews. That bar is not met everywhere. Barbershops are the clearest case in the other direction — we read twenty of them, they carry a median of 175 reviews each, and not one had answered any of its recent reviews. So a tattoo studio here is not being compared against a trade that has given up on replying. It sits in a town where 72% is what a typical measured business has managed, and where two of the three studios named above have answered every one of their last 10.
What to do about it
With the median rating at a flat 5, stars give a reader almost nothing to go on when they are looking at several tattoo studios at once. The reply record is the part of the listing that still differs, and it is the part an owner controls.
If your review file is near the median of 77, catching up is finite work — dozens of entries, not the hundreds that the 617-review file at the top of this trade would mean. Take the most recent ones first, since those are what our measure reads, and answer the good ones as well as the difficult ones. Write each one differently; a reply that repeats the one above it word for word adds nothing a reader could not already see. Then treat it as a standing habit rather than a one-off clear-out. The distance between a record of 10 of the last 10 and a record of 3 of the last 10 is not a single burst of effort — it is whether the next one gets answered too.
Tattoo studios
| # | Business | Answered | Reviews | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rowan Southdale Center | 10 of 10 | 617 | 5 |
| 2 | Ocean Blue Tattoo & Art Studio | 10 of 10 | 380 | 4.8 |
| 3 | Jackalope Tattoo | 3 of 10 | 477 | 4.9 |