This Best Practices document is intended to support digital marketing teams in optimizing Google’s understanding of a specific Medical Service, particularly as it relates to your Organization. The goal of this documentation is to ensure pages contain all the content required for a robust knowledge graph, and follow an HTML format that interfaces well with the Schema App Highlighter. Ideally, your team will document as a checklist during the planning and development phases of the HTML template. If you are exclusively using the Schema App Editor, you can ignore some of the constraints or suggestions related to authoring at scale.
The Strategy and Typical Page Content sections are best used during high-level design and brainstorming phases. The Content & Code sections for MedicalTest, MedicalProcedure, and MedicalTherapy are best used during the template development, coding, and markup authoring phases. General properties will be listed first, followed by Type specific properties.
These types are not eligible for any Rich Result appearances, unless the page has Review Content. Google’s Rich Result documentation for Reviews is subject to change. Check the Structured Data Type Definitions section for up-to-date information regarding required and recommended properties for Rich Result eligibility.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Medical Services are Often Described as One of Three Schema.org Types
- How To: Connect Medical Services to Your Organization
- List of Suggested Content for Pages about Medical Services
- Medical Services Schema.org Properties & Associated Code Requirements
Medical Services are Often Described as One of Three Schema.org Types
Often, an Organization providing Medical Services will have an informational page, designed to educate patients and their families and answer common questions. MedicalServices is not an official Type in the Schema.org ontology, but the broad category of "services offered by a medical institution" can typically be broken into the following Schema.org Types:
If you intend to use a Highlighter template, recall that the primary type of each page must describe the same “type” of thing. You could use Medical Web Page as your primary type, and state that the WebPage is about one of the three. This will likely require a significant amount of customization & conditional tagging. Another strategy is to target a sub-group of pages, focusing on a single Type (e.g only MedicalProcedure).
You’ll likely want to discuss your options with a Customer Success Manager to find the right strategy for your budget. If you are using the Editor to author markup for these pages, each page can easily have its own unique Type.
How To: Connect Medical Services to Your Organization
Pages about Medical Services often contain useful information, specific to your Organization. We want to leverage that rich information and capture it in a Knowledge Graph. There are a few different strategies involved here.
Multityping a Medical Service page using the Schema.org Type "Service" is always an option. In this case, a page about Blood Tests might be typed as a Service and a MedicalTest. This enables us to use properties like provider, or offers.
Another more advanced strategy is to build your content knowledge graph by connecting Medical Service content to other entities on your website. In this case, a page about a clinician might have a list of Services they provide. Using the Highlighter Lookup functionality, we can reference the specific markup describing each Medical Service. This requires a Highlighter level subscription and support from Customer Success to pursue.
List of Suggested Content for Pages about Medical Services
This section describes content commonly seen on this type of page. This checklist is best used during high-level design & brainstorming as you design templates & decide what information you intend to display.
General Properties: MedicalProcedure, MedicalTest, & MedicalTherapy |
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MedicalProcedure Specific Properties |
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MedicalTherapy Specific Properties |
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MedicalTest Specific Properties |
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Medical Services Schema.org Properties & Associated Code Requirements
This section lists schema.org properties that may be used to map page content to schema markup for a Medical Service page. Your ability to target, or include this content in your schema markup will depend on the page's content and, if you're using the Highlighter, the page's HTML structure. This section lists some of the content and code requirements you'll need to consider.
If you have any questions please contact your CSM or [email protected].
Schema.org Property | Content and HTML Requirements | Example |
name | Ensure the name of the Medical Service is easy to isolate. If the content of the page title varies, consider nesting the name of the Medical Service in a <span>. | <h1>An Overview of <span>CT Scans</span> </h1> |
description | Ensure a brief description of the Medical Condition is included, ideally in a standardized way. | The first <p> element includes a <span> containing a brief definition of the service. |
Service multitype:offers~Offer~offeredBy | Utilize internal linking wherever possible! If the people (i.e. Clinicians) or places (i.e. Hospitals) mentioned have an entity home (i.e a Clinician profile page), ensure that URL is present on the page to be referenced. Consider how easily unique location entities can be programmatically isolated (e.g contain location info for a particular hospital in a unique <div> rather than a series of undifferentiated <p> elements). | <p>Clinicians who specialize in Corneal Transplants <ul> <a href = "/provider/andrea_mcintosh"> Dr. Andrea McIntosh</a> </ul> |
Service multitype:areaServed~Place | Utilize internal linking wherever possible! If the places mentioned have an entity home (i.e a Hospital location page), ensure that URL is present on the page to be referenced. Consider how easily unique location entities can be programmatically isolated (e.g contain all location info in a unique <div> rather than a series of undifferentiated <p> elements). | <p>Locations where blood tests are offered: <ul> <a href = "/clinics/west_moorelake"> West Moore Lake Clinic</a> </ul> |
medicalCode | Typically, we advise that all the content in your schema markup must be present on your webpage. This advice is less relevant for identification codes and similar forms of metadata. You can include these values in your markup without calling attention to them in your web content. Explore the ICD-9, DiseasesDB, MeSH, SNOMED-CT, RxNorm ontologies and use the https://schema.org/MedicalCode type to describe these entities. Discuss any questions with your CSM. | |
recognizingAuthority | If the medical service requires a license or approval from a governing body, reference the name and URL of the Organization that grants approval | |
study, subjectOf | Citations or studies should follow a standardized format across articles. Ideally, citations should include a URL. Citations should be contained within a uniquely identifiable HTML element (e.g <div id = “citations”>). | |
image | Google requires that images have an accessible image address, to be indexed and displayed in search. | |
hasPart~FAQPage | If FAQs are written in the body of a broader piece of content (e.g an Article), ensure all FAQs follow a standardized HTML format & structure. If the answer element is a sibling to the question element, ideally it should contain the entirety of the answer text (e.g <div id = faq-answer> with nested elements. If FAQs are written in an accordion, ideally that accordion should be differentiated from other accordions (e.g <div id = “faq_accordion”>). Ensure all content is accessible to the Highlighter & present on the same URL (e.g avoid Answers contained in Javascript generated pop-up windows). | Nested Elements <h3>What does FAQ stand for? <p>FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Question</p> </h3> Sibling Elements <h3>What does FAQ stand for?</h3><div id = "faq-answer"> <p>FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Question</p> <p>It is an excellent way to respond to common queries</p> </div> |
review, aggregateRating | Reviews and Ratings nested within a Medical Service must be about the Service itself. Nested #document data is inaccessible to the Schema App Highlighter. Ideally, Rating information should be aggregated and submitted on the page itself. Google has their own content requirements for Reviews and Ratings. Always check their documentation page for the most up-to-date content requirements. When in doubt, discuss Rating and Review content with your CSM. | <div id = "rating-container"> <p>Total Ratings: <span id = "rating-count">36</span></p> <p>Aggregate Rating: <span id = "agg-rating-value">4.8</span></p> </div> |
video | Embed URL should be accessible within the HTML document. Nested #document data is inaccessible to the Schema App Highlighter. Special attention is required for Brightcove embed URLs. | <video embed-url= "https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=k0zOC1HL563FUkL6"> <a> Click Here To Start </a> </video> |
Other Properties Available to Medical Procedure, Test or Therapy
There are several other properties available to the Medical Condition type that may or may not make sense to include in your page content. If you are targeting this content at scale with the Highlighter, consider how easily unique location entities can be programmatically isolated. If you are interested in targeting these properties, your CSM or Support may have insights and additional guidance.
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