Physician Schema Markup

Physician Schema Markup Highlights Healthcare Professionals and Networks

For many, frustration with the American healthcare system starts when with the first step: finding the right physician.

This type of healthcare schema markup can powerfully showcase your physicians’ and provider’s expertise and help potential patients find them online. It can include specific medical information for query matching through question answering (FAQs), explaining a medical condition, videos, podcasts, images, and patient reviews – directly in the search results.

This article is meant to assist schema markup auditors and content creation teams. Your physicians’ bio or author pages can contain robust and important content required for bio or author pages can contain robust and important content required for the schema that informs and feeds your knowledge graph. It is useful in the ideation and development phases of creating this evergreen healthcare website page.

Physician schema is Best suited for independent physicians with a private practice and/or independent clinic.

First, we need to know that the Physician type is a specific subtype of MedicalOrganization. This includes all variants of Physician schema. Second, The tech giant has been and is specificallydedicated to improving search results related to medical care and health topics. ^[1]

According to schema.org/Physician, IndividualPhysician is a subType of Physician and has more opportunities to inform search engines and people while clarifying affiliation information.

Benefits of Implementing Physician Schema Markup

Identify medical services that the physician provides.
Reduce pre-existing online-related physician disparities and ambiguities (people with similar names).
Helps you target your messages to the right audience and each subpopulation.

Google’s new AI Overviews are having a big impact on medical education and physician care. Having clear proof of your qualifying information is more helpful than ever.

Key Physician Information to Include

Contact Information

Content & Code Requirements – Consider how easily contact information can be programmatically confused or outdated.

Physician schema helps build a healthcare knowledge graph

Schema markup is an important aspect of semantic search. It is a type of AI that can understand the context and relationship between words in a query. At the core of the semantic system is the knowledge graph. This is a network that represents real-world entities. Examples are doctors, medical services, locations, healthcare specialties, and medical symptoms, and they help by explaining the relationship between them.

When responding to a user query, the system matches the keywords (e.g., “facial basal carcinomas”) to the relevant categories within the healthcare knowledge graph. This provides people searching for a specific type of physician to gain better results than directly comparing text.

Available Services

Code and Content Requirements – Identify the specific medical services that each physician provides. Leverage an entity home (i.e a Medical Condition page), then ensure that entity’s URL is provided.

Practice Locations & Associations (Clinics, Hospital, Labs, Pharmacies)

Multiple organization locations can be nested in your Organization schema.
Take advantage of internal linking if you have location pages. Place your references that have an entity home (Hospital location page, associated medical lab, etc.), and properly include that URL within the page to be mentioned. New or unique locations can be easily isolated.

This is a great way that SEO schema helps disambiguate different but similar entities.

Specialty and Areas of Expertise

Content & Code Requirements – This section will likely be targeted by OLER. Ideally, we want all entities targeted by the same property (e.g specialty, or knowAbout) to be contained within a single parent component.

Accepted Insurance Types

Content & Code Requirements – People want to know in advance if their insurance is likely to cover costs.

Insurance Network ID

Include the physician’s network’s specific name or unique ID. This helps prospective patients plan for the cost of seeing a physician.

Physician Reviews and Ratings

To qualify, Reviews and Ratings on a Provider or Physician’s landing page need to have been posted for the Physician themselves or the Services they provide, not the medical entity in general. Rated and aggregated reviews can be submitted on the Provider page itself if the site is prepared to manage them.

Physician Profile Picture

On-page Content & Code Specifications – The image URL should be correct (live preferable on the same domain), crawlable, and indexed.

Additional schema.org properties can be used when mapping a web page and generating JSON-LD for a Provider Page. Prerequisite code or on-page content requirements impact how you can use specific schema.org properties. Each should be incorporated as intended for best results in healthcare-related articles.

Additional information for a Physician or Provider Page can included:

Name, Honorific, and Educational Suffixes
Profile Picture
Locations of Practice and/or Associations
Clinics
Hospital
Pharmacies
Maps
Contact information
Available Services
Specialty and areas of expertise
Research
Professional Associations
Formal Education
Current Memberships
Identification Codes (US NPI)
State Medical License
Physician Reviews and Ratings

It is highly beneficial if a physician can provide their NPI and medical license at the outset. However, due to their busy schedules, this is not always possible, which can pose a challenge. The inclusion of the person’s middle initial and any former last names can be instrumental. For instance, a lady physician I manage had both these key details associated with her maiden name. This knowledge allowed me to swiftly locate her information online, underscoring the importance of complete information.

There is a caveat to nesting information about a physicain’s review and rating that is important to heed. Reviews and ratings can be drawn from the healthcare entity’s Google Business Profile. We’ll cover that next.

Highlighting a Physician’s Experience and Expertise (E-E-A-T)

Schemas can reduce complexity by making it clear who is who. For example EducationalOccupationalCredential can be “A diploma, academic degree, certification, qualification, badge, etc., that may be awarded to a person or other entity that meets the requirements defined by the credentialer.”

Additionally, Certification and hasCertificationin helps verify the skills of a physician for a specific MedicalCondition or MedicalTherapy provider. For example, this is useful for a physician specializing in facial pain. This brings your schema markup to top-level.

Best Practices for Implementing Physician Page Schema

Whether you are a dental website, in pain medicine, or a surgeon, semantic SEO helps potential patients in need of your particular services find you online.

There are rules, guidelines, and best practices to follow. You should know upfront – they change as opportunities emerge and some types become redundant.

More specific types of Physician Schema

Google continues to update opportunities for healthcare business entities to provide more information. Lately, IndividualPhysician,PhysiciansOffice are added as subtypes of Physician to bring needed clarification to the longstanding ambiguity between these two different interpretations of the Physician schema type.

IndividualPhysician is helpful when you want to clearly specify the physician’s expertise and affiliation information (such as: practicesAt, hospitalAffiliation, knowsAbout, medicalSpecialty, alumniOf).

It is not intended for web pages describing people who are not qualified physicians; this applies to admin, medical transcriptionists, a physician assistant, paramedical professionals, etc.

Additionally, the occupationalCategory is amended. It is now applicable in the case of adding usNPI (National Provider Identifier) for use with NPI identifiers in the US. This means that physicians in the United States can immediately begin leveraging this opportunity to stand out from others with similar names.

The usNPI property is a unique 10-digit identification number issued to healthcare providers in the United States by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Unique healthcare-related schema markup exists for:

MedicalSpecialty
MedicalProcedure
MedicalTest
MedicalTherapy
MedicalDevice
MedicalEntity
MedicalCode (referencing a controlled vocabulary or ontology such as ICD-9, DiseasesDB, MeSH, SNOMED-CT, RxNorm, etc.
MedicalStudy

The above can all become a part of the medical entity’s big data footprint.

Nesting Reviews Within Physician Schema Markup

Looking at some history of the Physician type, Google updated its related documentation on September 18, 2019. ^[3]It made clear that Organization markup and its subtypes are not eligible for self-serving nested reviews in the structured data code. Up till then, we, for one, had been doing this. The documentation says the following.

“To explain more, in the past, an entity like a business or an organization could add review markup about themselves to their home page or another page and often cause a review snippet to show for that page. That markup could have been added directly by the entity or embedded through a third-party widget (many do this). We consider this “self-serving” because the entity itself has chosen to add the markup to its own pages, about its own business or organization.” – Google

Google has its unique content and implementation requirements for Reviews and Ratings schema. I keep an alert so that changes on its documentation page inform me of up-to-date content and code requirements.

Physician profile pages often include reviews and ratings. That is okay if you meet the requirements. You can nest the appropriate review schema markup on your physician pages – and possibly gain a review snippet – if the review was posted voluntarily on a platform that you don’t control.

Whether you are kicking your heels or excited about the new ways people find doctors, we are all advancing further into the digital age. The importance of a visible and trusted online presence for healthcare providers cannot be overstated.

Physician Schema Markup Helps Healthcare Organizations Increase Conversions

Patients can avoid seeking help from less informed and trained physician types when your content and schema direct them to the best doctor for their needs. This saves people and healthcare entities from unnecessary phone calls and referrals; an educated patient starts out pointed in the right direction. Your website can also expect higher conversion levels when the right patient or referring provider can easily find you online.

Learn More About Healthcare Marketing Opportunities

References:

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2017/12/for-more-reliable-health-search

[2] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/making-review-rich-results-more-helpful