What the 23 Evanston hair salon listings we analyzed show about websites, reviews, and ratings — a city-level slice of SitePeek's 2026 study, with the sample caveats stated plainly.
Between May and July 2026, SitePeek's business-discovery pipeline — built on the Google Places API — returned 23 listings for hair salons in Evanston, Illinois. We analyzed each listing's website link, review count, and star rating, and compared the results against the 4,604-listing national sample from our 2026 Local Business Google Visibility Report. One caveat before the table: this is the sample our pipeline discovered, not a roster of every hair salon operating in Evanston. Read each number as a competitive read on the analyzed field, never as a universal market share.
| Metric | Evanston sample | National study (n=4,604) |
|---|---|---|
| Listings analyzed | 23 | 4,604 |
| No website on the Google listing | 8.7% | 43.7% |
| Median Google review count | 61 | 45 |
| Listings with fewer than 10 reviews | 8.7% | 21.0% |
| Mean star rating | 4.73 | 4.6 |
Both columns describe analyzed samples — the 23 Evanston listings our pipeline discovered and the 4,604 listings in the national study — not every business in either market.
Website coverage ran ahead of the national benchmark in this sample: 8.7% of the 23 analyzed listings had no site linked from their profile, versus 43.7% nationally. For an owner, that cuts the other way — most of the Evanston hair salons we analyzed already give customers somewhere to land after the map result, so a listing without a website is the one that stands out, and not favorably.
The median listing in this sample had 61 Google reviews (the median across our full national study was 45), and 8.7% of the analyzed listings had fewer than 10 reviews (nationally: 21.0%). That is a high bar. In the Evanston hair salon listings we analyzed, half the field has already built 61 or more reviews — well above the national median — so a profile showing a couple dozen reads as the newcomer even when the business is older than its neighbors. Closing that gap is a volume game: a consistent ask after every completed job, every week, for as long as it takes.
Ratings, as almost everywhere, cluster near the top: the analyzed listings averaged 4.73 stars against the 4.6-star mean in our national study. A good star average alone will not differentiate a hair salon in this field — review volume, recency, and whether the owner replies are where the listings we analyzed actually differed from one another.
Two habits move every number in the table above, in any market: give Google a website link so the profile has somewhere to send people, and ask for a review after every completed job. Neither costs money — and among the listings we analyzed, both remain unevenly adopted enough to be an edge.
We ran the same read on hair salons in 3 of our city samples. Ranked by review depth, the Evanston sample lands 3rd of 3: a median of 61 reviews among the listings we analyzed, versus 78 in Chicago, 78 in Glenview. Review count is the first number a customer weighs before they click, so that ordering is a rough map of how hard the reviews race runs in each place.
Related samples in this study: Hair Salons in Chicago · Hair Salons in Glenview · Car Repair in Evanston.
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More snapshots: all 27 category-and-city samples · the national report.
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