What is structured data, in plain terms?
It is a short block of code on each page that states facts in a shared vocabulary called schema.org. The page might say your practice is open Tuesday to Saturday. The structured data says the same thing in a form a search engine or an AI assistant can read without interpreting a sentence. Google supports three formats and recommends one of them, JSON-LD, which sits in the page code and does not change how the page looks.1
Patients never see it. Its only job is to remove ambiguity about facts you have already published.
Which schema type fits my kind of practice?
Google's instruction for local businesses is to use the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible.2 On schema.org, the medical branch of that tree is MedicalBusiness, which lists more specific types including Dentist, Physician, MedicalClinic, Physiotherapy, DietNutrition and PrimaryCare.4 Several practice types our readers run have no type of their own.
| Practice | Likely type | Caution |
|---|---|---|
| Dental practice | Dentist | Licensed dental practices only |
| Physician-led functional medicine | Physician or MedicalClinic | Only where a licensed physician provides care |
| Chiropractic office | MedicalBusiness | No chiropractic business type exists |
| Acupuncture clinic | MedicalBusiness | Check state licensure first |
| Naturopathic practice | MedicalBusiness or LocalBusiness | Depends on state licensure |
| Health coaching | LocalBusiness or Organization | Not a medical provider type |
Chiropractic does appear on schema.org, but only as a value of MedicineSystem, a list of systems of medical practice alongside Ayurvedic, Homeopathic, Osteopathic and TraditionalChinese.6 It is not a business type, so a chiropractic office is marked up as a MedicalBusiness.
We take a firm line on the last row. A health coach is not a medical provider, and markup that says otherwise makes a licensing claim in a machine-readable format. The same care applies to health claims in your page copy: the markup cannot be braver than the page.
What should the markup actually include?
For the practice itself, Google lists two required properties for LocalBusiness: the name of the business and its physical address.2 It recommends adding telephone, opening hours, geographic coordinates, the website URL and price range where they apply.2
For the practitioner, schema.org offers IndividualPhysician, described as an individual medical practitioner, for physicians.5 The Physician family carries a usNPI property for the 10-digit National Provider Identifier issued to U.S. health care providers.5 Practitioners outside that type use Person, with:
- Name, exactly as it appears on the licence and on your Google Business Profile.
- Job title and credentials, as shown on the page.
- sameAs links to profiles that verify the person: a state board lookup, a professional association listing, LinkedIn.
- A worksFor link back to the practice.
Every fact should match your Google Business Profile character for character. The value of structured data is agreement. A schema block that lists different hours from your profile adds a contradiction instead of removing one.
Add BreadcrumbList on any page below the home page. It tells machines where a page sits in the site, and it takes minutes.
Why must the markup match the visible page?
Because Google requires it, in plain words. Its general guidelines say structured data must be a true representation of the page content, and that you should not mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page.1
The penalty is specific. A guideline violation can bring a manual action, which means the page loses eligibility to appear as a rich result. Google says this does not affect how the page ranks in web search.1 You can see any manual action in the Manual Actions report in Search Console.1
The rule also works as a discipline for a regulated business. If a sentence is too risky to show a patient, it is too risky to put in code.
What will Google actually show?
Less than many agencies promise. Google states that it does not guarantee structured data will show up in search results, even when a page is marked up correctly.1
The FAQ story shows how fast this moves. In 2023 Google limited FAQ rich results to well-known, authoritative government and health websites. It then deprecated the feature, announcing that it would no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026, and later removed the documentation entirely.3
So FAQPage markup is no longer a route to extra space on Google's results page. We still keep it on pages where the questions and answers are real and visible, because it costs nothing and cannot contradict the page. We would not add an FAQ section to a page only to mark it up.
What are the common mistakes?
- A medical type on a non-medical business, usually copied from a template.
- Two plugins each adding their own Organization block, with different names or logos.
- Review or rating markup for reviews the page does not display.
- Hours or phone numbers in the markup that were never updated after a move.
- Markup pasted on every page describing the home page, instead of each page describing itself.
Check each important page with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator after any change. This is part of the technical and compliance rebuild, and it is one of the seven steps in the pillar guide to becoming the practice AI recommends. Dental practices will find the same points in our dental page.