A dental listing in the set someone searching around Inver Grove Heights is shown carries 212 Google reviews at the median, and an orthodontic one carries 232. The three most-reviewed dental listings we read hold 746, 732 and 574 reviews; the three most-reviewed orthodontic listings hold 745, 644 and 381. Those are whole-listing totals, not a recent slice.
We read 20 dentists and 20 orthodontists, and only the businesses answering the most of their recent reviews are named. Among the dentists, Metro Dentalcare-Inver Grove Heights answered 10 of its last 10, on a listing with 574 reviews. Among the orthodontists, Horton Orthodontics answered 10 of its last 10 on a listing with 644 reviews, and Dunn Orthodontics answered 10 of its last 10 on a listing with 381. Because we list only the businesses answering the most, those figures say nothing about the rest of the twenty we read in either trade.
Across the 50 businesses we measured in what someone searching around Inver Grove Heights is shown, a typical one answered 63% of its recent reviews. That figure belongs to the 50 we measured, whichever trades they came from, and it is not a dental number. Across every trade in this catchment we read 460 businesses, and in four of those trades — food trucks, gyms, pet grooming and tattoo studios — not one of the twenty we read had answered any of its recent reviews.
The median rating is 4.9 among the dentists we read and 4.9 among the orthodontists. A median is one figure for a whole set; it does not tell you which listing is which. What this page orders on is reply behaviour instead: how many of a business's most recent reviews have a reply from the owner underneath them.
What to do about it
Both of these trades have a lot of review text sitting under them — a median of 212 for the dentists we read and 232 for the orthodontists — and the reply counts here do not come from those whole files. They come from each business's most recent reviews. That is the useful part: nobody is being asked to work backwards through 574 or 644 reviews. The job is the recent ones, and then keeping up with them.
Open your own listing and count how many of the last ten carry a reply. Answer the straightforward ones as well as the difficult ones, and write each reply about the thing that particular review mentions — a reply that could sit under any review on any listing says nothing specific. If replies have been going out from a template, changing that is a smaller piece of work than clearing a backlog, and it is the difference between a listing that gets answered once and one that stays answered.
Dentists
| # | Business | Answered | Reviews | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Metro Dentalcare-Inver Grove Heights | 10 of 10 | 574 | 4.9 |
Orthodontists
| # | Business | Answered | Reviews | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Horton Orthodontics | 10 of 10 | 644 | 4.9 |
| 2 | Dunn Orthodontics | 10 of 10 | 381 | 4.9 |