Healthcare structured data implementation guide

Every healthcare site needs a foundation of LocalBusiness or MedicalBusiness schema on the homepage. Schema.org defines MedicalClinic and Hospital as subtypes of both MedicalBusiness and LocalBusiness, so they inherit local discovery features like Google Maps eligibility.^[2]

Provider profile pages should use Physician schema, which supports properties for medical specialty, credential, hospital affiliation, and accepted insurance plans.^[3] Individual provider markup helps search engines match your team to specific condition and treatment queries.

Service and treatment pages benefit from MedicalProcedure schema, while condition-focused pages should use MedicalCondition. These connect your content to Google's medical knowledge graph, improving relevance for clinical queries.^[4]

FAQ pages on healthcare sites retain rich result eligibility – Google limits FAQ rich results to well-known, authoritative government and health websites.^[5] This makes FAQPage schema especially valuable for medical practices.

Google recommends JSON-LD as the preferred structured data format. It sits in a script tag in your page's head section, separate from the visible HTML – making it easier to maintain without affecting page layout.^[1]

Start with a single MedicalBusiness or MedicalClinic block on your homepage. Include your practice name, address, phone number, opening hours, and geo coordinates. Then add a nested Physician entry for each provider with their credentials and specialty.

For multi-location practices, each location page should have its own LocalBusiness schema with a unique address. Google uses this to match location-specific queries and populate Google Maps results.^[6]

Avoid common mistakes: don't mark up content that isn't visible to users, keep schema data synchronized with on-page content, and never use structured data to represent misleading information. Google's structured data policies explicitly prohibit these practices.^[7]

Google provides the Rich Results Test to check whether your structured data is eligible for enhanced search features. Run every page through this tool after adding or modifying schema.^[1]

Google Search Console's Enhancements section reports structured data errors across your entire site. Monitor this regularly – errors like missing required fields or invalid values can prevent rich results from appearing.

Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org) checks general schema.org compliance, while the Rich Results Test specifically checks Google's eligibility requirements. Use both: the validator catches structural issues, while the Rich Results Test confirms Google can process your markup.

AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews use structured data to understand what your content represents and whether it can be trusted as a source.^[8] Clear entity markup makes your practice easier for AI to identify and cite.

The combination of MedicalBusiness, Physician, and MedicalCondition schemas creates a web of entity relationships that AI can parse – connecting your practice to the conditions you treat, the providers on your team, and the location you serve.

FAQ schema is particularly useful for AI citation. When your questions and answers are structured with FAQPage markup, AI tools can extract and reference specific Q&A pairs rather than paraphrasing from unstructured content.^[5]