The 60 citations that did nothing for a vet

The 60 citations that did nothing for a vet

Meet a veterinary clinic in Glasgow. A previous agency had built sixty general citations — every generic business directory on the internet. Rankings hadn't budged.

The logic was volume: more citations, more authority. But these were the same low-trust general directories every business sits in. They added bulk, not relevance, and Google had long stopped being impressed by them.

We stopped chasing count and chased fit. We hunted the citations that actually meant something for a vet in Scotland: veterinary association listings, pet-service directories, the local Glasgow business network, breed and rescue community sites.

Fifteen of them. A fraction of the sixty.

Slow weeks. Citations don't fire overnight. But these carried topical and local relevance the sixty never had — they told Google what she did and where, not just that she existed. By month three she'd moved into the pack for "vet near me" in her district, and new-client registrations rose from 22 to 41 a month.

The lesson: fifteen relevant niche citations outweigh sixty generic ones. After the basics, citation count is a vanity number — what moves the pack is whether each listing proves your industry and your geography.