Prototypes for vetroots5.toolforge.ai, drawn from the same measured files the report already reads — the 1,544-point metro scan, the render crawl, the ranked-keyword pulls and the service-silo analysis. Every figure carries a table view; hover any mark for the underlying numbers. Palette, type and rules are the report’s own.
Estimated monthly organic visits, split into searches for the practice’s own name and everything else. Elliott Bay’s bar is almost entirely a single query — veterinarians near me emergency, 43,785 visits at rank 7 — which is 3.1× the entire organic footprint of the other six properties put together (13,931).
Brand detection uses the report’s own BRANDY pattern (build_report.py:130), so these splits match the prose on sheet 05. That pattern does not catch bothell animal hospital or rainier animal hospital, which are brand searches — so the own-name share here is a floor, not a ceiling.
| Property | Own name | Other non-brand | Outlier keyword | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elliott Bay Animal Hospital | 862 | 9,466 | 43,785 | 54,113 |
| Lynnwood Animal Hospital | 274 | 5,316 | — | 5,590 |
| Rainier Veterinary Hospital | 1,049 | 1,776 | — | 2,825 |
| Firgrove Veterinary Hospital | 1,259 | 1,099 | — | 2,358 |
| Bothell Pet Hospital | 772 | 974 | — | 1,746 |
| Rainier Animal Fund | 111 | 610 | — | 721 |
| Veterinary Roots (group) | 221 | 470 | — | 691 |
Each row is one search, read as presence → top three. Presence is the share of the 1,544 scanned map points where any of the five offices appears at all; the second figure is the share where one reaches the top three — the only positions a patient sees without tapping “more places”. Presence runs 38–86%. The podium never clears 3.0%. For comparison, one competitor holds the top three on 51% of the map for tplo surgery dog.
“Present” and “top 3” are the union across all five offices, so a cell counts once no matter how many offices reach it. The weakest search is vet near me; the strongest competitor on any single search is Animal Surgical & Orthopedic Center.
| Search | Cells present | % | Cells top-3 | % | Leading competitor | Its top-3 cells |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| low cost vet near me | 1,322 | 85.6% | 46 | 3.0% | Timber Ridge Animal Hospital | 66 |
| cat vet near me | 1,261 | 81.7% | 42 | 2.7% | Poulsbo Animal Clinic | 79 |
| vet urgent care near me | 1,188 | 76.9% | 31 | 2.0% | Olympia Pet Emergency | 108 |
| spay and neuter near me | 1,174 | 76.0% | 9 | 0.6% | Northwest Spay & Neuter Center | 463 |
| vet near me | 1,144 | 74.1% | 40 | 2.6% | Apple Tree Cove Animal Hospital | 64 |
| dog vet near me | 1,106 | 71.6% | 29 | 1.9% | Animal Emergency & Specialty Center | 114 |
| puppy shots near me | 866 | 56.1% | 9 | 0.6% | BoosterPet Veterinary Care & Urgent Care in Bonney Lake | 94 |
| tplo surgery dog | 696 | 45.1% | 24 | 1.6% | Animal Surgical & Orthopedic Center | 785 |
| dog dental cleaning | 645 | 41.8% | 19 | 1.2% | Big Valley Pet Resort | 72 |
| cat spay | 580 | 37.6% | 10 | 0.6% | Northwest Spay & Neuter Center | 457 |
Each bar is one property’s entire crawled page inventory. The canonicalised-away segment is pages that exist and load, and carry a canonical tag handing credit to a different URL — removed from the index by the site’s own instruction. This is not inferred: our renderer fetched every one of them, and all 464 are listed by URL in the crawl output. That leaves 45 of 509 pages at Bothell eligible to rank (9%). Every other property sits above 94%.
Corroboration from a second, independent dataset. A URL cannot rank without being in the index, so the URLs that do rank are proof of what Google holds. Across every keyword Bothell ranks for anywhere, only 8 distinct URLs ever appear — against 509 published. That is a floor, not the index count: pages can be indexed and rank for nothing. The exact number of Bothell URLs sitting in Google’s index is the one figure here nobody outside the practice can produce — it needs Search Console access to a property we do not own. Rainier is the only property with a never-fetched bucket (37 URLs); it is shown rather than folded into the denominator so the bar and the page count agree.
| Property | Eligible to rank | Canonicalised away | Never fetched | Pages fetched | Eligible share | URLs proven indexed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bothell Pet Hospital | 45 | 464 | 0 | 509 | 8.8% | 8 |
| Rainier Veterinary Hospital | 49 | 77 | 37 | 163 | 30.1% | 34 |
| Firgrove Veterinary Hospital | 16 | 1 | 0 | 17 | 94.1% | 5 |
| Elliott Bay Animal Hospital | 35 | 1 | 0 | 36 | 97.2% | 10 |
| Lynnwood Animal Hospital | 37 | 1 | 0 | 38 | 97.4% | 11 |
| Rainier Animal Fund | 96 | 2 | 0 | 98 | 98.0% | 12 |
| Veterinary Roots (group) | 18 | 0 | 0 | 18 | 100.0% | 6 |
Seven service lines have no service page on any of the seven properties. Each bar is monthly Seattle–Tacoma searches for that line’s leading query, labelled with what the same traffic costs to buy at the going click rate. Across the 5 lines with real demand that is $100,859 a month, against zero pages. Grooming is the surprise: 9,900 searches a month, level with emergency care, at a quarter of the click price.
Every line on this chart is now measured. Four of them had no volume anywhere in the dataset until 2026-08-04, because the keyword seed pool was built from the silos the group already offers — so discovery never asked about the ones it does not. run_11f_absent_silo_volume.py closed that with one $0.09 lookup at the same Seattle–Tacoma DMA as the rest of the report. Microchipping is a genuine negative result, not a gap: its leading term draws 20 searches a month and five of its six terms returned no volume at all. Each figure is the line’s single highest-volume query, never a sum — DataForSEO reports clustered synonyms at identical volume (“dog grooming near me” and “dog groomer near me” are both 9,900 at $1.67), so adding a line’s keywords together would count the same demand twice.
| Service line | Leading query | Searches / month | Cost per click | Monthly value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency | emergency vet near me | 9,900 | $5.97 | $59,103 |
| Grooming | dog grooming near me | 9,900 | $1.67 | $16,533 |
| Boarding | dog boarding near me | 4,400 | $4.30 | $18,920 |
| Daycare | dog daycare near me | 1,900 | $2.74 | $5,206 |
| End-of-life care | pet cremation near me | 590 | $1.86 | $1,097 |
| Pharmacy | pet pharmacy | 110 | $9.63 | $1,059 |
| Microchipping | dog microchipping near me | 20 | $4.21 | $84 |
A filled square is a live listing found by our check; an empty one is an absence. The rows are sorted by how many of the five practices appear, so the block of empty rows at the bottom is the group’s shared blind spot: 12 directories carry no listing for any practice. The best-covered property, Elliott Bay Animal Hospital, reaches 11 of 26; Bothell Pet Hospital and Lynnwood Animal Hospital reach 3.
Read this as reach and consistency, not as rankings. Of the 25 of these directories that map to a website, only 2 — Instagram, Yelp — appear anywhere in the 20 Seattle result pages measured in figure 6. The remaining 23 never surface. Their value is a consistent name, address and phone number across the web, which is a ranking input for the map pack, plus the patients who search those sites directly. A report that sells them as page-one placements is selling something this data does not show.
| Directory | Bothell | Elliott | Lynnwood | Rainier | Firgrove | Listed on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | 5 | |
| Yelp | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | 5 |
| ● | ● | ● | ● | — | 4 | |
| AAHA | — | ● | — | ● | — | 2 |
| Apple Maps | — | ● | — | ● | — | 2 |
| BBB | — | ● | — | — | ● | 2 |
| — | ● | — | ● | — | 2 | |
| MapQuest | — | ● | — | ● | — | 2 |
| DVM360 | — | ● | — | — | — | 1 |
| PetDesk | — | — | — | — | ● | 1 |
| VetRatingz | — | — | — | — | ● | 1 |
| Veterinarians.com | — | ● | — | — | — | 1 |
| Yellow Pages | — | ● | — | — | — | 1 |
| YouTube | — | — | — | ● | — | 1 |
| Angi | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Bing Places | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Chamber of Commerce | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Foursquare | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Healthgrades | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Hotfrog | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Manta | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Nextdoor | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Thumbtack | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Vets Directory | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Vetstreet | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Wellness.com | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
Every cell is one organic result. Across the 20 searches patients actually type, 85% of the top-20 positions belong to another veterinary practice, 9% to a directory the group could be listed in, and 5.8% to the group. The best position any group site reaches is 1, and 4 of the 20 searches return no group property at all in the top 20.
Rows are ordered by the group’s best position, so the searches it is absent from fall to the bottom. Those bottom rows are the same story as figure 4: the searches with no group property anywhere in the top 20 are dog boarding near me, dog daycare near me, cat kennel near me, exotic vet near me — boarding, daycare and exotic care, three of the service lines with no page behind them. Absence from the results follows absence from the website. Gaps in a row are positions the API returned fewer than 20 results for. The directory share is small here, which is the point of the caveat on figure 5: being listed everywhere is worth doing for consistency and for direct traffic, but on these searches the page-one contest is against other practices, not against directories.
| Search | Best group position | Group results | Directory results | Other practices |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| urgent care veterinarian | 1 | 3 | 1 | 15 |
| animal hospital near me | 3 | 1 | 1 | 17 |
| vet clinic near me | 3 | 1 | 2 | 16 |
| vet urgent care near me | 3 | 3 | 1 | 15 |
| pet hospital near me | 4 | 1 | 1 | 17 |
| veterinarian near me | 5 | 1 | 2 | 15 |
| animal hospital | 6 | 1 | 2 | 16 |
| low cost vet near me | 6 | 1 | 2 | 16 |
| emergency vet | 7 | 2 | 1 | 16 |
| 24 hour vet near me | 7 | 1 | 1 | 17 |
| vet near me | 8 | 1 | 2 | 16 |
| cat vet near me | 11 | 1 | 2 | 16 |
| veterinarian | 12 | 1 | 1 | 17 |
| veterinary clinic near me | 13 | 1 | 2 | 16 |
| emergency vet near me | 15 | 2 | 1 | 16 |
| cat boarding near me | 15 | 1 | 3 | 15 |
| dog boarding near me | — | 0 | 2 | 17 |
| dog daycare near me | — | 0 | 2 | 17 |
| cat kennel near me | — | 0 | 3 | 16 |
| exotic vet near me | — | 0 | 4 | 15 |
One panel per Google profile, sharing a single scale so the heights compare directly. The tallest bar in each row is that practice’s busiest year, labelled with its count. Every one of the five peaked in 2022 or earlier. Firgrove Veterinary Hospital has the largest audience in the group at 896 reviews, and is running 39% below its 2020 rate. Reviews are the one ranking input a practice controls outright. Elliott Bay Animal Hospital is the exception worth asking about: its part-year 2026 (32) has already passed its whole of 2025 (17), so something there changed.
Five profiles, not seven properties. The Veterinary Roots and Rainier Veterinary Hospital websites share a single Google profile (cid 1026324305872410551), so its reviews are counted once here — this is what the report means by seven properties and five reputations. The final column is a part year: it runs to 2026-07-19, the most recent review anywhere in the group, so it is shown in its own shade and must not be read as a full-year total. It is also not annualised, because a review rate is not evenly spread across a year.
A review is not a permanent asset. Recency and sustained influx score as ranking factors in their own right — 11th and 14th of 187 — so a decade-old wall of reviews loses to a competitor’s steady weekly trickle. That is practitioner consensus, not Google: Google’s own guidance names review count and rating, and never mentions recency.
The fix is mechanical. Fire an automated text or email when the appointment closes out in the practice-management system, one tap through to the Google profile. 83% of people asked for a review last year left one — a practice that doesn’t ask isn’t competing for them. Make it a two- or three-step sequence, then measure your own conversion: the lift figures the trade press quotes for follow-ups trace back to nothing, and the only rigorous evidence is survey research, not reviews.
| Figure | Source | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Recency 11th, sustained influx 14th of 187 factors | Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors 2026 | 47 experts scoring 187 factors. Expert opinion — no access to Google’s algorithm. |
| 83% of those asked left a review; 78% were asked | BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 | 1,002 US adults, SurveyMonkey. Published 11 Feb 2026. |
| Three successive reminders each raised response | Sauermann & Roach, Research Policy, 2013 | Peer-reviewed, >24,000 invited. Web-survey response, NOT review requests — an analogue only. |
| “More reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking” | Google, Improve your local ranking | Google’s own guidance. Names count and rating only — no mention of recency. |
| Profile | Total reviews | Peak year | Peak count | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 so far |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firgrove Veterinary Hospital | 896 | 2020 | 131 | 75 | 80 | 40 |
| Bothell Pet Hospital | 527 | 2022 | 70 | 49 | 37 | 20 |
| Rainier Veterinary Hospital | 466 | 2020 | 80 | 35 | 43 | 19 |
| Elliott Bay Animal Hospital | 355 | 2021 | 53 | 33 | 17 | 32 |
| Lynnwood Animal Hospital | 159 | 2022 | 21 | 15 | 17 | 13 |
A page no internal link points at is a page a visitor cannot navigate to and a crawler has little reason to keep. At Bothell 449 of 509 pages (88%) are in that state, and the 60 that are reachable all sit within 2 clicks of home. Rainier Fund orphans 34 of 98; Lynnwood, Firgrove and the group site orphan almost nothing.
This is the mechanism behind figure 3, measured a second way. That figure read canonical tags; this one follows links. They are independent signals and they agree: Bothell’s 449 orphans and its 464 canonicalised-away pages describe the same collapsed site from two directions. The table below adds a column counting service and location pages reachable by one internal link at most — 67 at Bothell, 29 at Rainier Fund — pages that exist and rank for nothing because nothing points at them.
| Property | Reachable | Orphaned | Orphan share | Pages crawled | Deepest click-depth | Money pages with ≤1 inbound link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bothell Pet Hospital | 60 | 449 | 88% | 509 | 2 | 67 |
| Rainier Veterinary Hospital | 75 | 88 | 54% | 163 | 11 | 2 |
| Rainier Animal Fund | 64 | 34 | 35% | 98 | 5 | 29 |
| Elliott Bay Animal Hospital | 24 | 12 | 33% | 36 | 2 | 9 |
| Firgrove Veterinary Hospital | 14 | 3 | 18% | 17 | 2 | 0 |
| Lynnwood Animal Hospital | 35 | 3 | 8% | 38 | 2 | 0 |
| Veterinary Roots (group) | 17 | 1 | 6% | 18 | 2 | 0 |
A filled square means that hospital has a service page for that line — a page shaped like a service, not a passing mention in a blog post. Not one of the 18 lines is covered by all five. Rainier Veterinary Hospital covers the most at 9. Firgrove Veterinary Hospital describes no services at all — its site carries not one service page. The 7 empty rows at the bottom are the lines nobody covers, which is figure 4’s finding shown as an inventory.
Three lines rest on a single site: laser therapy on Elliott Bay, puppy & kitten and specialist referral on Rainier. A group that markets itself as one practice presents five different menus, and a patient who searches for a service reaches whichever site happens to describe it — or, for 7 of 18 lines, none of them.
| Service line | Rainier | Elliott | Bothell | Lynnwood | Firgrove | Sites |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dental | ● | ● | ● | ● | — | 4 |
| Surgery | ● | ● | ● | ● | — | 4 |
| Urgent care | ● | ● | ● | ● | — | 4 |
| Wellness exams | ● | ● | ● | ● | — | 4 |
| Diagnostics & imaging | — | ● | ● | ● | — | 3 |
| Nutrition | ● | ● | ● | — | — | 3 |
| Senior care | ● | — | ● | ● | — | 3 |
| Vaccinations | ● | ● | ● | — | — | 3 |
| Laser therapy | — | ● | — | — | — | 1 |
| Puppy & kitten | ● | — | — | — | — | 1 |
| Specialist referral | ● | — | — | — | — | 1 |
| Boarding | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Daycare | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Emergency | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| End-of-life care | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Grooming | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Microchipping | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Pharmacy | — | — | — | — | — | 0 |
Each cell is how many of the 1,544 scanned map points that firm holds a top-three position in, for that search. Darker is more. The names at the top are not general practices — they are a spay/neuter clinic, an orthopaedic surgery centre and four emergency hospitals. Northwest Spay & Neuter Center alone holds the top three on 6% of all cell-searches measured. The group’s strongest office, Firgrove, ranks 206th of 3,940 firms.
This is the evidence behind figure 4’s recommendation. The map does not reward breadth; it rewards a site that is unambiguously about one service. Every firm above the group is narrower than the group. Rank is out of the 3,940 distinct firms the scan saw anywhere in the metro, and the five group offices are shown wherever they fall rather than being promoted into the top 25.
| Firm | Rank | Total | vet near me | vet urgent care near me | cat vet near me | dog vet near me | spay and neuter near me | dog dental cleaning | tplo surgery dog | low cost vet near me | cat spay | puppy shots near me |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northwest Spay & Neuter Center | 1 | 969 | 4 | 0 | 6 | 4 | 463 | 4 | 0 | 15 | 457 | 16 |
| Animal Surgical & Orthopedic Center | 2 | 785 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 785 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Puget Sound Veterinary Specialty & Emergency | 3 | 676 | 32 | 32 | 6 | 78 | 91 | 7 | 342 | 27 | 0 | 61 |
| Animal Emergency & Specialty Center | 4 | 521 | 40 | 47 | 17 | 114 | 140 | 4 | 17 | 58 | 0 | 84 |
| Veterinary Emergency Group (Lynnwood) | 5 | 513 | 15 | 34 | 10 | 112 | 227 | 0 | 12 | 27 | 0 | 76 |
| Veterinary Emergency Group (Seattle) | 6 | 507 | 23 | 44 | 23 | 98 | 234 | 0 | 12 | 15 | 0 | 58 |
| Hawks Prairie Veterinary Hospital | 7 | 485 | 57 | 46 | 50 | 65 | 36 | 56 | 86 | 51 | 7 | 31 |
| Timber Ridge Animal Hospital | 8 | 409 | 40 | 75 | 43 | 48 | 58 | 28 | 1 | 66 | 46 | 4 |
| Apple Tree Cove Animal Hospital | 9 | 408 | 64 | 61 | 60 | 48 | 0 | 5 | 52 | 61 | 7 | 50 |
| Bellevue Veterinary Emergency & Specialty | 10 | 403 | 6 | 22 | 2 | 83 | 109 | 0 | 136 | 5 | 0 | 40 |
| Spanaway Veterinary Clinic | 11 | 388 | 37 | 33 | 32 | 39 | 55 | 49 | 0 | 54 | 42 | 47 |
| Nisqually Veterinary Clinic | 12 | 378 | 42 | 32 | 37 | 50 | 53 | 47 | 15 | 47 | 25 | 30 |
| Buckley Veterinary Hospital | 13 | 376 | 58 | 41 | 49 | 60 | 28 | 50 | 3 | 49 | 20 | 18 |
| Oly Cats | 14 | 369 | 2 | 0 | 64 | 1 | 100 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 143 | 57 |
| Poulsbo Animal Clinic | 15 | 368 | 44 | 38 | 79 | 35 | 30 | 4 | 55 | 50 | 14 | 19 |
| Uptown Animal Hospital & Urgent Care | 16 | 362 | 29 | 50 | 45 | 60 | 57 | 2 | 24 | 42 | 3 | 50 |
| Kitty Klinic | 17 | 359 | 1 | 2 | 73 | 2 | 80 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 189 | 8 |
| Dupont Veterinary Center | 18 | 357 | 49 | 34 | 47 | 47 | 41 | 40 | 2 | 37 | 32 | 28 |
| Pine Tree Veterinary Hospital | 19 | 356 | 53 | 48 | 44 | 45 | 26 | 7 | 38 | 46 | 13 | 36 |
| Mountain View Veterinary Hospital | 20 | 312 | 34 | 42 | 43 | 39 | 8 | 60 | 0 | 56 | 6 | 24 |
| BoosterPet Veterinary Care & Urgent Care in Bonney Lake | 21 | 305 | 10 | 34 | 16 | 12 | 8 | 63 | 0 | 44 | 24 | 94 |
| BoosterPet Veterinary & Urgent Care Puyallup/South Hill | 22 | 303 | 17 | 65 | 26 | 22 | 3 | 39 | 3 | 45 | 18 | 65 |
| Deschutes Animal Clinic | 23 | 301 | 34 | 11 | 33 | 36 | 32 | 34 | 7 | 42 | 41 | 31 |
| Veterinary Emergency Group (Redmond) | 24 | 301 | 16 | 33 | 3 | 75 | 124 | 0 | 5 | 14 | 0 | 31 |
| Spay & Neuter Clinic at Seattle Animal Shelter | 25 | 301 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 161 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 134 | 1 |
| Firgrove | group | 62 | 11 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 4 | 8 | 0 | 6 | 8 | 1 |
| Lynnwood | group | 59 | 9 | 10 | 17 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 15 | 0 | 0 |
| Elliott Bay | group | 57 | 11 | 7 | 7 | 9 | 0 | 2 | 8 | 10 | 0 | 3 |
| Rainier (HQ) | group | 41 | 6 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 10 | 0 | 3 |
| Bothell | group | 40 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 8 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 2 |
A site-wide number is one appearing on at least a fifth of a property’s pages. Elliott Bay Animal Hospital and Bothell Pet Hospital each run two different numbers site-wide — at Bothell they sit on 509 and 502 of 509 pages, so nearly every page carries both. Rainier Animal Fund has the opposite problem: its number appears on 7 pages and the other 91 carry none. Name, address and phone consistency is a direct input to map-pack ranking, and it is among the cheapest things on this list to fix.
Two things this figure deliberately does not claim. Counting every distinct number would be misleading — Bothell’s crawl saw 15, but 13 appear on a single page each and are referral and emergency numbers quoted inside articles, which is normal. Only numbers on a fifth or more of pages are counted here. And vetroots.com carries five numbers on every page because it is the group site listing all five hospitals — correct, not a defect, and marked as such. Phones are DERIVED from the crawled corpus. The GBP phone is NOT known yet and must not be assumed equal to the modal site phone.
| Property | Pages | Site-wide numbers | One-off numbers | Pages with none | The numbers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rainier Animal Fund | 98 | 0 | 2 | 91 | — |
| Elliott Bay Animal Hospital | 36 | 2 | 10 | 0 | 2062857387, 2062859074 |
| Bothell Pet Hospital | 509 | 2 | 13 | 0 | 4254863251, 4256528461 |
| Rainier Veterinary Hospital | 126 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2063244144 |
| Lynnwood Animal Hospital | 38 | 1 | 14 | 0 | 4257716300 |
| Firgrove Veterinary Hospital | 17 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 2538481563 |
| Veterinary Roots (group) | 18 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 2062857387, 4254863251, 4257716300, 2538481563, 2063244144 |
Each point is one property: referring domains across, keywords ranking in the top ten up. If authority were driving results the points would trend upward. They do not — the correlation is r = -0.01, effectively none. Rainier Animal Fund has the strongest backlink profile in the group (domain rank 207, 127 referring domains) and just 17 top-ten keywords, while Lynnwood Animal Hospital converts 68 referring domains into 53.
Seven points is not a study. A correlation across seven properties is weak evidence on its own and would not survive as a general claim about link building. What it does support is narrower and more useful: within this group, the properties with the most links are not the ones ranking, so more links is not the lever to pull first. Figures 3, 8 and 9 name what is holding those sites back, and none of it is authority.
| Property | Domain rank | Referring domains | Backlinks | Top 10 | Top 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rainier Animal Fund | 207 | 127 | 1,029 | 17 | 1 |
| Rainier Veterinary Hospital | 187 | 339 | 2,507 | 32 | 10 |
| Bothell Pet Hospital | 172 | 243 | 527 | 24 | 5 |
| Elliott Bay Animal Hospital | 165 | 169 | 553 | 65 | 11 |
| Firgrove Veterinary Hospital | 140 | 47 | 146 | 34 | 9 |
| Lynnwood Animal Hospital | 118 | 68 | 190 | 53 | 8 |
| Veterinary Roots (group) | 54 | 39 | 72 | 18 | 1 |