How Schema Markup Supports Medical Device Marketing
Medical device sales can improve by leveraging Schema Markup to boost SEO and achieve rich results that help you get featured in search engine result pages (SERPs).
The medical device market is highly competitive due to competitors selling similar software devices and hardware products. Better conversion rates rely on the effectiveness of your sales team working with your writers, SEOs, and search marketers to convert leads into new customers. Aligning your sales and marketing team is the best way to determine the quality of leads and support the work of your schema markup expert.
Healthcare types of semantic markup add structured data to web pages or other data sources, annotating various elements with specific types and properties defined in a shared vocabulary. This creates machine-readable metadata that describes entities (e.g.medical device products), their attributes, and their connections to other entities.
How semantic schema markup can help your message reach professional stakeholders and funders:
A medical device may offer life-saving solutions that healthcare providers and patients desperately need. The urgency is increased when the value of your solution to their problems is lost in the noise online.
Problem: In today’s competitive marketplaces, getting your new medical product in front of the right audience is crucial. Traditional SEO and marketing efforts alone might not be enough to reach the specific healthcare professionals, stakeholders, and patients who need your solution.
Solution: By implementing schema markup, a web page “speaks” the language that empowers search engines to understand the unique nature of your product. This enables us to achieve enhanced visibility in search results, driving increased traffic and engagement from the audience you are trying to reach.
Good Healthcare Marketing Needs Clear Communication of Value Proposition
Digital marketing and SEO for healthcare companies require a comprehensive 8-pillar audit; schematics is only one aspect.
Schema is just one part of your communication efforts. It is not meant for searchers; it is code to help search engines find and display your content to relevant search queries.
Schema markup empowers you to highlight important details about your product, such as its features, benefits, pricing, and reviews. This information helps stakeholders quickly assess the value proposition and relevance to their needs, making them more likely to engage with your company.
Custom schema markup strategies are powerful tools for communicating your product’s value, building credibility, and connecting with stakeholders. By making your information more accessible and understandable to search engines and users, you increase your chances of securing funding and reaching the right audience for your product.
Semantic Enrichment:
By utilizing a shared vocabulary and defining clear relationships, schema markup imbues data with semantic meaning. This enhances the machine’s ability to understand the context and connections within the data, allowing for more sophisticated reasoning and analysis. Since there are many medical devices of all sorts and types flooding the market, semantic enrichment disambiguates your product from others.
Improved Search Visibility:
By using relevant schema types like Product, Service, or Organization and accurately marking up your healthcare product or company’s information, you increase the chances of appearing “Ask the doctor” question-answer SERPs, and knowledge panels. This enhanced visibility helps potential investors, partners, and customers discover you more easily.
Targeted Audience Reach:
Schema markup enables search engines to understand your offerings, target audience, and niche expertise better. This helps connect your product with relevant search queries made by investors, stakeholders, or potential customers looking for solutions like yours.
Using specific schema types like ‘PathologyTest’, ‘MedicalTest’, and ‘MedicalDevice’ ensures that your products appear in search results relevant to the specific needs and queries of healthcare professionals and patients.
Building Trust and Credibility:
By providing structured data about your product and company, you project a professional image and demonstrate transparency. This builds trust with stakeholders, making them more confident in considering your product for funding or partnership opportunities.
Networking and Collaboration:
Certain schema types, such as Person and Organization, can help establish connections with potential investors, mentors, and collaborators within your industry. This networking potential can open doors to funding opportunities and valuable partnerships. For example, your organization’s profile page or about page should be fully crawled, indexed, and disambiguated for similar entities.
Attracting Media Attention:
Rich search results with detailed information about your product can capture the attention of journalists and bloggers. This increased media exposure can further raise awareness about your product and attract potential investors and stakeholders.
Investor-Specific Schema:
Specific schema types like Grant, FundingScheme, and MonetaryGrant can be used to clearly outline your funding needs, preferred investment types, and past funding successes. This targeted information helps attract investors looking for opportunities that match their criteria.
Schema annotation (or enumeration) allows us to control specific definitions such as description, name, type, example values, and allowed values for the model properties. Additionally, it offers additional filtering properties for medical device types.
What is a schema enumeration?
A schema enumeration is an element that defines a list of acceptable values for a class or attribute. Enumerations are often defined at the beginning of a schema, before the main element, and can be accessed from other schemas. They can be used to create a “controlled vocabulary” for values, enabling standard reporting and categorization.
Health and Medical Schema Types
These schemas provide a way to annotate entities with codes that refer to existing controlled medical vocabularies (examples: MeSH, SNOMED, ICD, RxNorm, UMLS, etc) when available.
Examples of current schemas for medical device enumeration:
MedicalDevice
Any object used in a medical capacity, such as to diagnose or treat a patient.
MedicalTest
A device used to perform the test. Properties from MedicalEntity. A medical code for the entity, taken from a controlled vocabulary or ontology. Instances of MedicalTest may appear as a value for the following properties: MedicalClinic, Physician (a medical service available from this provider), or DiagnosticLab.
MedicalEntity
The most generic type of entity related to health and the practice of medicine. Property, Expected Type, Description. Properties from MedicalEntity. It may include MedicalSystem, the system of medicine that consists of this MedicalEntity, for example, ‘evidence-based,’ ‘homeopathic,’ ‘chiropractic,’ ‘WesternConventional’ for traditional medical procedures, etc.
PathologyTest
A medical test performed by a laboratory typically involves an examination of a tissue sample by a pathologist.
Health and medical types
These schema types complement existing vocabularies and ontologies. It is helpful to annotate entities with codes that refer to existing controlled medical vocabularies (examples: MeSH, SNOMED, ICD, RxNorm, UMLS, etc.).
MedicalTestPanel
A medical code for the entity, taken from a controlled vocabulary or ontology such as ICD-10, DiseasesDB, MeSH, SNOMED-CT, RxNorm, etc. Includes funding: A Grant that directly or indirectly provides funding or sponsorship for this item. It can also leverage ownershipFundingInfo.
MedicalDevicePurpose
Categories of medical devices, organized by the purpose or intended use of the device.
MedicalStudy
A medical study is an umbrella type covering all kinds of research studies relating to human health or medicine. This includes observational studies, interventional trials and registries, and randomized, controlled, or uncontrolled studies that may be useful to support medical device sales.
Diagnostic
A medical device used for diagnostic purposes. Diagnostic procedures identify problems, illnesses, or diagnoses, while therapeutic procedures treat or prevent illnesses.
Therapeutic
A medical device used for therapeutic purposes. A member value for enumeration type: MedicalDevicePurpose.
MedicalObservationalStudy
An observational study is a type of medical study that attempts to infer the possible effect of a treatment via observation of a cohort of subjects over a specified time. This contrasts with controlled studies, such as the randomized controlled trials represented by MedicalTrial, where each subject is randomly assigned to a treatment group or a control group before the start of the treatment.
Marketing Medical Devices and Life Sciences Products
With the proper use of schema markup, medical organizations and medical device manufacturers can instantly increase their chances of gaining featured search results.
When executed in tandem with video marketing, email, social media marketing, paid ads, etc., you can captivate high-intent users, driving increased clicks, leads, and conversions.
Healthcare marketing for a medical device online starts with exceptional annotated content. You have the foundation for good marketing afterpublishing YMYL web pages that demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). You can engage your target audience with highly trusted content to get your messaging where healthcare professionals, stakeholders, and consumers are most receptive.
Two essential ways to boost medical articles with SEO schema:
- MedicalWebPage (a single-topic web page about a health or medical topic).
- MedicalScholarlyArticle (a page with a record, abstract, or full text of a medical scholarly publication).
How Healthcare Schema Markup Helps Build Knowledge Graphs Many traditional marketers get excited when learning of the untapped potential of Schema Markup to build a content knowledge graph to enhance websites’ visibility and, ultimately, sales.
Schema structured data is a coding language that search engines leverage to build knowledge graphs. Knowledge graphs consist of nodes and edges, where nodes are important entities like people, places, or products. These “edges” represent connections between them. Schema markup helps search engines understand articles so they can display it to users in large, visual graph formats.
Semantic schema markup currently plays a significant role in the construction and enrichment of knowledge graphs by providing a standardized way to represent and connect entities and their relationships within a document. When informed effectively through schema, the knowledge graph and knowledge panels can be the best way to improve rankings and traffic performance.
Product schema annotation relies on semantic triples that support graph embeddings. It can take your article writing skills to a whole new level. Your particular healthcare niche is most likely highly competitive. Those who put in the extra strategic effort sell the most products.
The knowledge graph is a massive display in box format on the right in SERPs. It is increasingly populating in more searches and commands Google Search real estate. Brands need to ensure they are [resemt and correctly represented. Companies should use schema markup to gain product knowledge panels. These capture traffic and increase rankings within the knowledge graph itself.
Example Schema Code for Medical Devices
While Google doesn’t create Knowledge Panels specifically for individual medical devices, they do sometimes generate Product Panels for certain medical devices. These panels are similar to Knowledge Panels in that they appear on the right-hand side of the search results page, but they focus exclusively on product information. This data is either supplied by or confirmed through schema markup.
- Product Images: Usually a prominent image of the device or its featured image.
- Key Features: A brief list of the device’s main features.
- Pricing: Sometimes shows prices from various retailers.
- Reviews: May include user reviews if available.
- Links to Purchase: Links to online stores where you can buy the device.
Example of basic schema code for MedicalDevice:
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”,
“@type”: “MedicalDevice”,
“name”: “MyNewMedicalDevice”,
“description”: “A groundbreaking device for [intended use]”,
“manufacturer”: “Your Company Name”,
“image”: “https://www.yourwebsite.com/product_image.jpg”,
“url”: “https://www.yourwebsite.com/product-page”,
“category”: “Medical Devices”,
“sku”: “1234567890”
}
</script>
Knowledge Graphs and GenAI in Medical Device Engineering & Marketing
Automatically producing knowledge graphs is much more difficult in the case of healthcare retail products.
In our tightly regulated medical device product engineering and marketing sphere, using advanced data structures and artificial intelligence provides an edge when overseen by human intelligence. The knowledge graph is revolutionizing how data is managed, analyzed, and utilized in this field.
Without knowing the technology behind it, funders, stakeholders, hospitals, patients, etc., often find answers to their search queries from a combination of knowledge graphs, ML, and GenAI. This transformative approach in the medical device industry can enhance marketing efficiency and pave the way for more advanced, reliable, and personalized medical marketing solutions.
If you struggle to reach decision-makers, we can use data-driven insights to help you optimize your medical device sales cycle. With the proliferation of AI, the need to establish verified online identities has become increasingly important. The verified status of your medical device can enhance trust and authenticity.
SUMMARY: Medical Device Product Identification an Uses
Utilizing schema markup demonstrates your commitment to staying ahead of the curve in terms of modern search engine optimization. It helps you stand out from competitors who may not be leveraging this valuable technology. As more patients turn to the web to find medical information, it’s imperative that they receive meaningful and accurate results. Healthcare providers also search for the right provider to refer to for specific patient needs. Using schema markup, you can boost search visibility and increase the quality of traffic coming to your site, but you are also making it easier for them to find the information they need.
To learn more about how you can achieve more visibility in healthcare AI Overviews, let’s talk further about Cutting-Edge E-commerce Healthcare Marketing