Introduction

Healthcare organizations can instantly boost their search engine optimization performance through the implementation of structured data. Highlight important information in organic search results for your existing and prospective patients with schema markup, including contact information, specialties, location, business hours, and more.

Structured data translates your content into the language of search engines so Google can better understand your webpages. In this guide, we’ll show you 6 specific page types to mark up so that you can start standing out in search and booking more appointments. These types include hospitals, medical clinics, medical conditions, medical procedures, medical therapy, and physicians.

What is Structured Data?

Structured data is basically code written in a specific format so that search engines can understand your website content. When search engines read this code, they can display the information with enhanced results in search called rich results.

Why Structured Data for Healthcare

Structured data is a powerful but underutilized SEO strategy that can help healthcare organizations stand out in search. By adopting this strategy, you can bring important and relevant information to consumers at the start of their health journey online resulting in higher engagement and more appointments booked.

What if all your Doctor’s profiles looked like this in search? This is a rich result.

Rich results are powered by structured data.

Here are three leading healthcare organizations. Read about their Schema App Experiences driving results from structured data.

The 3 S’s of Your Content Strategy: SEO, Structure and Schema

June 2, 2021

In this episode, hosts Chris Boyer and Reed Smith discuss the importance of the three S’s of Content Strategy. They outline seven considerations for an SEO optimized content strategy and how structured data plays a role in content design. They are then joined by Martha Van Berkel, of SchemaApp, who shares ways she uses schema to help health systems with rebranding and physician engagement.

SpecialAnnouncement Rich Results

SpecialAnnouncement markup should be added for time-stamped information updates about COVID-19 made by locally-oriented organizations, such as schools, pharmacies, healthcare providers, community groups, police, and local governments. To learn more about how to markup your website with SpecialAnnouncement schema, read our in-depth article here.

Review Snippets for Healthcare Organizations

Patient engagement is important for any health organization. 94% of healthcare patients leave online reviews about their experiences. From clinics to doctors, reviews can help organizations to stand out in search, to display their credibility, and to engage searchers with interactive rich results. Since sites like healthgrades.com show these reviews, it is a must have. Combine them with FAQ and own even more search real-estate.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) Rich Results for Healthcare Organizations

Search is a resource for answering questions. Having the answers to questions regarding healthcare and your organization showing as rich results is an effective way to stand out in search. By adding frequently asked questions and answers to your website and marking them up with FAQPage schema, they’re eligible to appear in search as interactive rich results. FAQs could answer questions about COVID-19 testing facilities, as the following example displays.

Other opportunities for FAQ rich results include information about booking appointments, or about the healthcare organization itself.

Recipe Rich Results for Healthcare Organizations

An interesting opportunity that we’re seeing several of our healthcare clients adopt is Recipe schema markup. If your organization has the capacity to maintain a blog, posting recipes for healthy living and then marking them up with Recipe schema can make that content eligible for rich results in search.

What types in the schema.org vocabulary are specific to healthcare?

Schema.org contains a Health and Life Sciences extension of over 200 types and 160 properties specific to the medical space. These include everything from terms for describing diseases and injuries, such as AnatomicalStructure and MedicalSignOrSymptom, to terms for describing systems of medicine, such as TraditionalChinese and WesternConventional.

Since this is a vocabulary that is often changing, some of the available types and properties are pending. All these terms can still be accessed in Schema App by going into Settings > Project Settings and selecting “Schema+All Layers”. Schema.org has stated that organizations using the vocabulary are encouraged to join community discussions and share their usage scenarios to help improve the schemas.

Some of the more commonly used types are:
Hospital, MedicalClinic, MedicalCondition, MedicalProcedure, and MedicalTherapy.

Where should I begin with my schema markup for healthcare?

As a first step, it’s a good idea to markup your homepage as either an Organization or a subtype that’s more specific to the healthcare industry. Some examples include MedicalOrganization, MedicalBusiness, MedicalClinic, and Physician. For more information about getting this markup setup, check out our Ultimate How-to Guide for Local Business Schema Markup.

Once you’ve established markup for your homepage, we recommend taking a look at Google’s list of features. If any content on your site aligns with these features, using these types can make this content eligible for rich results within search. Just make sure you’re satisfying all the properties that are required!

Some features that have been used with success in the healthcare industry are: Article, FAQ, Review snippet and Video.

How should I markup a Hospital or MedicalClinic?

Both the Hospital and MedicalClinic types are subclasses of LocalBusiness. This means they are eligible for Local Business rich results within search. Beyond the properties required and recommended by Google, some additional properties that may be of interest are:

How should Physician pages be marked up?

In Schema.org, Physician is defined as “A doctor’s office” which is also a subtype of LocalBusiness. The same properties listed in the table above should also be considered when marking up a Physician data item. However, only the Physician type has access to the hospitalAffiliation property which expects the value Hospital. What’s more, you may want to state that this Physician is an alumniOf a particular medical school. The alumniOf property is only available to the Person type. In the event you want to markup this information, consider using the employee property to connect to a Person data item. This Person⁠—now embedded within the Physician data item⁠—can use the alumniOf property.

What kind of medical markup is eligible for Review Rich Results?

In 2019, Google updated the list of things that could be eligible for the Review snippet rich result. This update excluded Articles, Blog Postings and Services. LocalBusiness is still eligible for review rich results, meaning Hospitals, Medical Clinics and Physicians can all benefit from this markup. The one stipulation is that ratings and reviews can’t come from the organizations themselves. They have to come from a third party application in order to ensure unbiased reviews and be eligible for markup.

In the case of Advent Health, their development team built an internal solution using Press Gainey to ingest ratings and doctor.com to manage the data. Due to patient privacy requirements, they removed any identifiable user information replacing names with “Advent Health verified patient”.

How can I measure the success of my healthcare structured data?

To assess changes in your site’s metrics, consider using Google Analytics. If you’d like more information about search-engine performance and the health of your markup, consider using Google Search Console, SEMRush or the Schema App Analyzer.

Learn more about How to Measure the Impact of Structured Data.

Do I need to mark up all content on my web pages with structured data?

Google’s General Structured Data Guidelines state that markup should only be added if relevant content exists on the page and is visible to users. While your content must inform your schema markup, you can also consider schema markup when creating your content. If you’re missing any properties that are required for rich result eligibility, consider adding this information to your content.