Ace Tattoo & Piercing carries 1914 Google reviews and answered 1 of its last 10. Minneapolis Tattoo Shop carries 542 and answered 9 of its last 10. Sacred Siren Parlor carries 635 and answered 3 of its last 10. Those are two different measurements sitting side by side, and it is worth separating them: the review count is the whole listing, while the reply count is drawn only from that business's most recent reviews.
We read 20 tattoo studios in the set someone searching around St. Louis Park is shown, and the median one holds 177 reviews. The three most-reviewed of them hold 1914, 1204 and 635. The median rating across the 20 is 4.9, and a median is one figure for the whole set: it does not tell you which listing is which. Nothing here is ordered by stars in any case.
We measured 55 of the businesses someone searching in St. Louis Park is shown; a typical one answered 60% of its recent reviews. That is the figure for the 55 we measured, not a figure for this trade, and we do not know which trades those 55 came from.
Set the 177 median against the other trades we read around here and it lands in the middle of a wide field: massage at 53, hair salons at 81.5, pet boarding at 116, coffee shops at 205, dentists at 229, restaurants at 1023. Depth of file is not the same thing as replies under it, though, and one trade in this catchment shows that plainly. Of the 20 barbershops we read, not one had answered any of its recent reviews. That is the only kind of statement we can make about a whole trade; everywhere else the honest unit is a single business and its own two numbers. In total we read 480 businesses across every trade around St. Louis Park, a town of 49541 people.
What to do about it
The reply counts on this page come from each business's most recent reviews, and that is also the sensible place to start working. A listing sitting on 1914 reviews does not need going through from the beginning. Take the newest ones, answer the warm ones as well as the difficult ones, and write each reply to the thing the customer actually described. If someone wrote about a specific piece or a specific session, that detail is material nobody else could have used, and a reply built on it reads nothing like the same two lines repeated down a page.
Then decide which job you are doing. Catching up once and keeping up are different, and only the second survives a busy month: pick a fixed day, give it a few minutes, and let it run. With a median rating of 4.9 across the 20 studios we read, a median gives someone comparing listings very little to go on. What is written underneath is the part that differs.
Tattoo studios
| # | Business | Answered | Reviews | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Minneapolis Tattoo Shop | 9 of 10 | 542 | 4.8 |
| 2 | Sacred Siren Parlor | 3 of 10 | 635 | 4.9 |
| 3 | Ace Tattoo & Piercing | 1 of 10 | 1914 | 4.7 |