Boost SEO with Healthcare Schema Markup for the Medical Field

By Erik Bonsaksen on 2023-08-23

What Is Healthcare Schema Markup?

It's a set of schema markup types to make health and medical content on the web into structured data. These can improve CTR through rich snippets, page authority, brand visibility, voice search and Search Generative Experience (SGE).

Examples of types are:

Hospital
MedicalCondition
Conditions

And here's one example for Service from a MedicalBusiness, using JSON-LD format:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Service",
  "serviceType": "Osteopathy",
  "additionalType": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteopathy",
  "provider": {
    "@type": "MedicalBusiness",
    "name": "Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital",
    "image": "https://example-site/Osteopathy.jpg",
    "priceRange": "$$",
    "telephone": "0000 00000",
    "hasMap": "https://maps.google.com/?cid=1111",
    "address": {
      "@type": "PostalAddress",
      "streetAddress": "11-22 street",
      "addressLocality": "Springfield",
      "addressRegion": "Illinois",
      "postalCode": "447"
    }
  }
}

Which Websites Should Use Medical Structured Data?

There are many use cases, but the most prominent involve websites listing or featuring the following content types:

Medical information sites
Hospitals
Medical clinics
Medical practices
Medical professionals
Medical organizations
Medical news sites
Medical blogs
Healthy recipe pages
Medical review sites
Medical directories
Medical events

All of these can benefit from healthcare schema markup. However, clinics and practices that list their professionals and services have shown particularly strong results.

How Can Healthcare Schema Markup Help SEO?

Applying schema markup for the healthcare, medicine, and life science sector can truly benefit SEO.

The healthcare industry is highly competitive, so leveraging structured data can help you stand out in the search result page, boosting search visibility and traffic quality in the process.

For example, physicians can showcase their expertise and increase bookings through Review Snippets and FAQs, a medical information site can add markup for symptoms and conditions so it's easier for Google to understand when they should show their pages to related search queries.

In addition to highlighting your website in the SERP, adding schema markup ensures your content becomes structured data. This helps search engines (and AI crawlers) understand your web content and improve their knowledge graph.

What Is a Knowledge Graph for the Healthcare Industry?

It's a visual representation of facts about entities, and the relationships between them.

Said simpler, with a practical example: it's the meaning behind your web content, and how it relates to other meanings:

Entities: are the things or concepts, like "Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital"
Relationships: The links that connect entities and describe how they relate to each other, like:

Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital" -> "treats" -> "man flu

This is an example of a knowledge graph for a FAQPage markup:

By organizing information in this way, knowledge graphs make it easier to understand complex data sets, discover new insights, and answer questions by traversing the connections between entities.

They are commonly used in search engines, recommendation systems, and artificial intelligence applications to provide more accurate and context-aware results.

However, connecting the dots within healthcare is not always easy for the robots, and this is where you can supply the information with schema markup (which is your content served in an organized manner, which robots love).

How to Add Healthcare Schema Markup?

I'm not gonna lie: schema markup is an advanced technical SEO technique for medium to large websites. Fortunately, one way to do it is by using metamanager. Our tool can find relevant types, create the markup, deploy it to all webpages and fully automate the process - with one click.

How are we able to do it? We read your page content, find applicable markup and build a template. Then you connect metamanager to your website and let the machinery go wild.

Which Healthcare Schema Markup Types Should You Use?

As of 2023, there's over +200 types of schema markup related to the healthcare industry. There's also numerous different scenarios and use cases, but the most common ones are:

Hospital
MedicalClinic
MedicalCondition
MedicalProcedure
MedicalTherapy
Physician

More specific types are:

Drug
MedicalGuideline
MedicalWebPage
MedicalScholarlyArticle

When you go down this path, you'll need to deal with conditions:

Conditions
Signs and symptoms
Causes
Risk factors
Therapies (including drugs and procedures)
Tests
Devices
Studies and trials
Guidelines
Diets
Supplements
Exercise plans
Anatomy

Other markup types not directly linked to healthcare:

FAQPage
Review
SpecialAnnouncement
Recipe (health diets anyone?)

Another example of healthcare schema markup:

{
  "@type": "ItemList",
  "@id": "https://examplehospital.com/locations#ItemList",
  "url": "https://examplehospital.com/locations",
  "name": "Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital Office Locations",
  "itemListElement": [
    {
      "@type": "ListItem",
      "@id": "https://examplehospital.com/doctors/locations",
      "item": [
        {
          "@type": "MedicalClinic",
          "@id": "https://examplehospital.com/doctors/locations",
          "address": [
            {
              "@type": "PostalAddress",
              "@id": "https://examplehospital.com/doctors/locations",
              "addressCountry": [
                {
                  "@type": "Country",
                  "@id": "https://examplehospital.com/doctors/locations",
                  "name": "USA"
                }
              ]
            }
          ],
          "contactPoint": [
            {
              "@type": "ContactPoint",
              "@id": "https://examplehospital.com/doctors/locations",
              "contactType": "Patient Services",
              "areaServed": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States",
              "telephone": "+1 123.543.5678"
            }
          ],
          "smokingAllowed": "http://schema.org/False",
          "isAccessibleForFree": "http://schema.org/False",
          "priceRange": "$",
          "publicAccess": "http://schema.org/True",
          "isAcceptingNewPatients": "http://schema.org/True",
          "name": "Baptist Primary Care - Brooklyn Family Medicine"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

To answer which types you'll need, we need to analyze which structured data you're eligible for. Book a meeting with us and we'll help you figure it out and implement it.