Before we get into the details of how to make your plastic surgery practice stand out, lets first talk about Structured Data, Rich Snippets and Schema.org

#1: What is structured data?

Structured data is on-page markup that enables search engines to better understand the information currently on your business’s web page, and then use this information to improve your business’s search results listing. For example, structured data makes it easier for web crawlers to determine company basics, such as NAP (name, address, place) data, as well as some complex information such articles, events, products, services etc. on your website.

#2: How to get started with structured data and SEO?

Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is one of the most useful free tools to help your business get started with structured data. This content is then used not only for SERP, but may also be incorporated into Knowledge Graph panels or Google Now cards, which in turn increases your business’s online reach. The Data Markup Helper will generate sample HTML code with microdata marked up which can be downloaded and then uploaded on your website.

#3: What are Rich Snippets?

Some data can also be used to create and display Rich Snippets within the search results. For example, the Rich Snippet at the right shows search results for a plastic surgeon, including review stars, an aggregate rating value, and vote count — very useful to anyone searching for information about your practice. Here is an example on how it can look like:

#4: What is Schema.org?

Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.

Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example,

Plastic Surgeon

tells the browser to display the text string “Plastic Surgeon” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means—”Avatar” could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.
Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo!

Here is the link for Plastic Surgeons to use Schema on their websites: https://schema.org/PlasticSurgery

Finally, you need to do the following:

• Use Structured Data Testing Tool to test a single page’s markup for correctness. You can either enter a URL for the tool to fetch, or paste in marked-up HTML code directly. Repair all errors reported by the tool before deploying your markup!
• The Structured Data Dashboard, a feature of Webmaster Tools, helps you monitor Google’s understanding of your structured data over time.

Hope this article helped you understand the fundamentals of Structured Data and how Plastic Surgeons can use them for their website to start showing up higher than their competitors.

We are San Antonio based Digital Marketing company focused on Plastic Surgeon and Healthcare Marketing, so feel free to contact us for a FREE 1 hour consultation on your website @ 210-582-5842 or info@dmsapiens.com