How do Haddonfield's Google reviews compare to big city averages?
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What is a good number of Google reviews for a small business?
It’s a question lots of local entrepreneurs ask. Are they keeping up with their competition? Are potential customers going to be impressed or underwhelmed when they see how many reviews their business has?
Google reviews in particular matter for one other key reason: they affect search rankings. In fact, SEO experts believe the sheer quantity of Google reviews is currently one of the 10 most important factors determining where a business ranks in Google searches, just behind the quality of those reviews.
In other words, simply having a relatively high number of reviews is a good thing for search engine optimization (SEO), while too few can make it less likely someone will find a business.
I recently came across some interesting data to help provide a directional answer for what good looks like.
Darren Shaw, the founder of Whitespark, a local marketing software platform, recently scraped the Google Business profiles of more than 1.1 million businesses across the United States. Specifically, he performed 168 different searches in each of the 100 largest American cities, and compiled information on the top 100 businesses that appeared for each search.
Using that data, he created an average review count by business category, e.g. dry cleaner, hair salon, law firm, etc. I’m going to call this the national metro average for ease of reference, knowing that it’s technically not a comprehensive national average, since it’s only the average of the top businesses in cities with at least 250,000 residents.
The folks at Near Media provided their own take on the data, pointing out that:
A few categories dominate review counts, like historical landmarks, restaurants, hotels, and automotive dealerships.
Some categories you wouldn’t assume would garner high customer engagement still received hundreds of reviews on average, such as medical diagnostic imaging centers and garbage dump services.
Many business categories get almost no reviews on average, such as civil engineers and psychologists.
They lastly emphasized the importance of performing similar analyses locally, since the national average is less relevant than the average in the locality where a business is actually competing to rank in search results.
To that end, I reviewed more than 200 Google Business Profiles in our hometown of Haddonfield. The downtown commercial district, mainly along Kings Highway from Grove Street to Washington Ave, provides a good variety of small businesses in a condensed area with lots of vehicle and foot traffic. I compiled each business’s review count, ranked them, compared them to the national metro average for their business category, and here’s what I found.
A few businesses have been able to exceed expectations
In general, the national review distribution was true locally.
Of those businesses with the most reviews in Haddonfield, 18 of the top 20 were related to food and beverage, similar to the nationwide numbers noted above. At the time I did this analysis in mid-July 2024, The Bistro led the pack with more than 1,400 reviews, followed by Passariello’s and The British Chip Shop with more than 600 each.
Meanwhile, multiple professional services businesses had between zero and 10 reviews, which is again typical for businesses of this type.
What surprised me most were the two businesses that made the top 20 that weren’t food and beverage related.
The first was Forever Valentine Beauty, a permanent make-up clinic on Haddon Avenue. As of this writing it had 570 reviews. That made it the fourth most-reviewed business in Haddonfield, which is impressive by itself, but pretty unbelievable when you compare it to the national metro average of only 71 reviews for that business category. The only other PMU business I could find in the region with a similarly high rating was their other location in South Philly, which has more than 780 reviews!
The second business, which ranked 18th with 249 reviews, was The Sokol Firm, a law firm that specializes in short sales with an office on Kings Highway. That national analysis looked at more than 10,000 of the top law firms in major metropolitan areas, and the average was only 19 reviews, which means this small office has 13 times the number of reviews of the average city attorney’s office.
Even more mind-blowing, if you break it down on a per-attorney basis, that’s better than all the major law firms that saturate billboards and broadcasts in the Greater Philly market, because those mega firms have thousands of reviews, but also dozens of attorneys. For a boutique firm based in a suburban downtown, hundreds of reviews is remarkable.
15 percent of businesses beat the national metro average
Even though Haddonfield is a relatively small town, the downtown is as lively as many city streets, so I initially assumed that businesses in the heart of town would stack up pretty well against larger cities.
However, only about 30 businesses of the 200 we looked at had more reviews than the national metro average for their category. Those storefronts that outperformed spanned a range of categories, including multiple barber shops, jewelers, real estate agencies, and coffee shops.
One thing helping those businesses that have an above average number of reviews is that the national metro average for their category is relatively low. Of those 30 businesses that exceed the average, only four were in categories that averaged more than 100 reviews: bistro, bakery, and coffee shop.
For instance, the three popular coffee shops in town - Jersey Java, Saxby’s and Starbucks - all beat the national metro average of 332. The Saxby’s location is actually the chain’s best reviewed location nationwide, while the Starbucks exceeds the average and has more reviews that many other Starbucks locations in Philadelphia. (Fun fact: the original Starbucks in Seattle - which has a line of tourists outside almost every day - has nearly 6,000 reviews as of today. It’s good to be a coffee shop AND a tourist attraction.)
Many other businesses in Haddonfield have a couple hundred reviews - great by most people’s standards - but the averages in major cities are several hundred to several thousand. Those are pretty lofty expectations for smaller businesses in smaller communities.
I mean small in a physical sense, too, because the actual size of the business is a major factor here. A typical coffee shop in a city is not dramatically larger than one in a suburb, and might even be smaller. Restaurants in a major city, however, can be massive. For instance, Del Frisco’s in Philadelphia has more than 3,500 reviews, but it also has hundreds of seats (and has been around a lot longer than Google).
Similar businesses can have dissimilar review counts
One of the common jokes around town in Haddonfield is how many similar businesses there are. It seems like whenever there’s a store of one kind, it’s inevitable a second of the same type will open nearby. We currently have two toy stores, two tea stores, two pet groomers, etc.
However, I was surprised how little overlap there actually is as far as Google Business Profile primary categories are concerned.
The primary category is what Google considers most relevant when someone performs a search, even though you can select additional secondary categories when setting up a profile. For example, Mountwell’s primary category is “Marketing agency,” but we also list “Branding agency,” “Graphic designer,” “Website designer,” “Advertising agency,” “Marketing consultant,” etc.
Of the 200 businesses I looked at in Haddonfield, there were 177 different primary categories, which is more than I would’ve guessed.
That said, the category types available sometimes seem duplicative. For instance, there are nearly 20 businesses that cut hair within a 5-minute walk of each other, but they’re broken up into “hair salon,” “beauty salon” and “barber shop.” Similarly, there are 8 businesses that sell women’s clothes, divided between “boutique,” “clothing store,” and “women’s clothing store.”
These seem like trivial differences, but the national metro averages for each seem to vary somewhat significantly. For instance, top barber shops average over 90 reviews, while beauty salons only average 55. Boutiques average 34 reviews, while clothing stores average 287.
I suspect this variation is a reflection of the types of businesses that were scraped in the national analyses, and not some kind of natural law for how many reviews a certain type of business should expect. Boutiques are usually small, by definition, whereas if you look for a clothing store in Philadelphia you’re going to get massive, multi-level stores like Urban Outfitters, Nordstrom Rack, Banana Republic, etc.
The same goes for restaurants. I don’t think there’s any intrinsic reason that Thai restaurants should average 617 reviews while Indian restaurants should average 873. There may simply be more popular Indian restaurants than Thai restaurants in most cities.
Takeaways for both businesses and consumers
Both business owners and consumers can learn a few things from this comparison.
For business owners, it should highlight that the number of reviews can vary significantly by your type of business. Knowing how you compare to others in your category could help you address a weakness or build a strength. A few of these examples also show that your location and category is not your fate - it’s possible to far exceed the norm even in a small community like Haddonfield.
If you only have a few reviews, but similar businesses have many more, maybe you should start prompting people to leave more reviews. If you only have a few reviews, and that’s typical for your category, getting only a few more reviews could significantly improve your ranking compared to your competition.
For consumers, I think it’s also important to recognize that some of these numbers are simply a function of the number of people coming through the door.
Restaurants with more seats, or law firms with more lawyers, or any businesses in cities with millions of residents, are more likely to get more reviews. A small local business may be just as good or better than one in a city, only smaller. It’s important to keep this in mind when evaluating businesses on Google.
That also means you should leave local businesses more Google reviews because it could make a big difference compared to already popular destinations.
How does your business compare to the national average?
If you’re curious about the national averages by primary category, I included a portion of the data below. There were more than 1,000 categories in the scrape, so I just included here those categories relevant to businesses in my survey of downtown Haddonfield.
Remember, these aren’t actually averages of every business in the country within each category. This was generated by gathering details on businesses that ranked in the top 100 results for 168 different searches across the 100 largest cities in America. Using that data, they organized businesses by their primary categories, and averaged the number of reviews the group had.
In some cases, only a few businesses surfaced in each category, which significantly skewed the data. For instance, only 5 hot dog restaurants were scraped in the survey. I suspect one of these could’ve been a hot dog restaurant in Chicago that currently has 3,400 reviews, which clearly would be an outlier affecting the mean.
So, take this info for what it’s worth - an interesting set of data, albeit not comprehensive or definitive.
Don’t see your category here? Drop a comment at the bottom of the page and I’ll get it to you!
| Primary category | National metro average |
|---|---|
| Hot dog restaurant | 3,105 |
| Hamburger restaurant | 1,799 |
| British restaurant | 1,581 |
| American restaurant | 1,336 |
| Craft store | 1,296 |
| Brunch restaurant | 1,228 |
| Mexican restaurant | 1,218 |
| Pizza restaurant | 1,217 |
| Italian restaurant | 1,215 |
| Japanese restaurant | 1,042 |
| Restaurant | 888 |
| French restaurant | 877 |
| Indian restaurant | 873 |
| Christian book store | 873 |
| Vegan restaurant | 864 |
| Mediterranean restaurant | 862 |
| Bistro | 818 |
| Grocery store | 636 |
| Thai restaurant | 617 |
| Gourmet grocery store | 572 |
| Performing arts theater | 534 |
| Health food restaurant | 467 |
| Creperie | 408 |
| Book store | 395 |
| Furniture store | 378 |
| Brewery | 373 |
| Bagel shop | 359 |
| Ice cream shop | 357 |
| Coffee shop | 332 |
| Tea store | 318 |
| Clothing store | 287 |
| Sandwich shop | 274 |
| Bridal shop | 257 |
| Bakery | 256 |
| Distillery | 254 |
| Running store | 242 |
| Frozen yogurt shop | 225 |
| Cookie shop | 213 |
| Chocolate shop | 168 |
| Musical instrument store | 153 |
| Home goods store | 150 |
| Bicycle shop | 149 |
| Real estate rental agency | 142 |
| Winery | 134 |
| Optometrist | 133 |
| Cigar shop | 133 |
| Toy store | 126 |
| Spice store | 119 |
| Entertainment agency | 119 |
| Fashion accessories store | 117 |
| Consignment shop | 112 |
| Dermatologist | 109 |
| Event venue | 107 |
| Medical spa | 98 |
| Hair salon | 95 |
| Personal injury attorney | 92 |
| Barber shop | 91 |
| Charity | 88 |
| Antique store | 87 |
| Portrait studio | 85 |
| Jeweler | 79 |
| Gift shop | 77 |
| Drug store | 74 |
| Pet groomer | 72 |
| Permanent make-up clinic | 71 |
| Laundry service | 71 |
| Fitness center | 68 |
| Spa | 67 |
| Florist | 65 |
| Shipping and mailing service | 62 |
| Tanning salon | 58 |
| Criminal justice attorney | 56 |
| Wellness center | 55 |
| Beauty salon | 55 |
| Chimney sweep | 54 |
| Cabinet maker | 50 |
| Clothing alteration service | 47 |
| Logistics service | 47 |
| Insurance agency | 46 |
| Yoga studio | 44 |
| Women's clothing store | 44 |
| Limousine service | 44 |
| Dry cleaner | 42 |
| Nurse practitioner | 41 |
| Military recruiting office | 40 |
| Water damage restoration service | 40 |
| Title company | 40 |
| Massage therapist | 39 |
| Real estate agency | 37 |
| Lawn care service | 36 |
| Real estate agent | 36 |
| Physical fitness program | 36 |
| Legal services | 35 |
| Boutique | 34 |
| Apartment building | 33 |
| Martial arts school | 33 |
| Law firm | 32 |
| Software company | 31 |
| Estate planning attorney | 30 |
| Tax preparation service | 30 |
| Caterer | 30 |
| Pilates studio | 30 |
| Wedding photographer | 29 |
| Paper store | 27 |
| Executive search firm | 24 |
| Kitchen remodeler | 23 |
| Bank | 23 |
| Recording studio | 22 |
| Art studio | 22 |
| Invitation printing service | 21 |
| Tutoring service | 20 |
| Real estate developer | 19 |
| Attorney | 19 |
| Video production service | 19 |
| Upholstery shop | 18 |
| Landscaper | 18 |
| Education center | 15 |
| Website designer | 13 |
| Landscape architect | 12 |
| Interior designer | 8 |
| Consultant | 8 |
| Investment service | 6 |
| Financial planner | 6 |
| Engineer | 5 |