Citations and the consistency problem

What a citation is

Any mention of your clinic's name, address and telephone number on a site other than your own. Directories, professional registers, review sites, local news, the page of a supplier listing its stockists, a chamber of commerce. Most clinics have dozens and know about four of them.

Their function is corroboration. A search engine assembling an understanding of a business uses these mentions to confirm that the business exists, where it is, and how to contact it. Agreement between them raises confidence. Disagreement lowers it.

Consistency over volume

The instinct is to acquire more citations. The higher-value work is almost always to correct the ones that exist, because inconsistency does active harm while an additional listing on an obscure directory does close to nothing.

The common inconsistencies, in order of how often they appear: an old telephone number from before a change of system, a suite or floor number present in some and not others, an abbreviated street type in some and spelled out in others, a former trading name, and an address from a previous premises that nobody ever corrected.

Establishing the canonical version

Before correcting anything, write down the one true version. Name exactly as on the door, address in one specific format including or excluding the suite number, one telephone number, and the website address with or without www, chosen once.

That version goes on your website footer, on your Business Profile, and in the structured data described in Module 14, Structured data for treatment pages. Those three are the source. Everything else is a copy, and copies are corrected against the source rather than the other way round.

Which listings actually matter

A short list, in priority order.

1. Your Business Profile, which is not a citation exactly but is the anchor for everything else.
2. The professional registers your practitioners appear on, which patients check at the assurance stage and which carry more weight with readers than any directory.
3. Major national directories in your sector, of which there are a handful rather than hundreds.
4. Any site that already sends you enquiries, which you can identify from your own analytics.
5. Local listings with genuine local audiences, such as a town's own business directory.

Everything below that is optional and most of it is worthless. A clinic that corrects the first four categories has done the entire useful part of this work.

The citation building industry

There is a substantial industry selling the submission of your details to several hundred directories. It is inexpensive, it is easy to sell because it produces a report with a large number on it, and its value is close to zero for a clinic that has already corrected the listings that matter.

It also creates a maintenance liability. Every listing created is a listing that will eventually be wrong, on a site you cannot log into, using an email address that belonged to somebody who has left. The clinics with the worst consistency problems are frequently the ones that bought a citation package several years ago.

Correct what exists. Create only what a patient might actually read. Then stop, and spend the time on the treatment pages.

Keeping it correct

The moment consistency breaks is the moment something changes: a new telephone system, a move, a change of trading name, a practitioner leaving. Those events are rare and predictable, which makes this maintainable.

Keep a list of every place your details appear, with the login for each, in the same document as your canonical version. When something changes, work the list. It takes an afternoon and it is the only version of this work that stays correct.

Add an annual check to the review routine in Module 31, What to measure, and what to ignore: search your clinic's name and telephone number and see what comes back. Anything wrong is either a listing to correct or a listing you did not know existed, and both are worth finding.