Lack of Internal Resources & Expertise to Manage Markup at Scale

Initially, Marshfield Clinic attempted to implement Schema Markup internally, and they had successfully implemented Schema Markup on their physician pages to attain Review Snippets. However, implementing Schema Markup at scale across their site proved to be more challenging than they thought due to resource constraints and a lack of expertise within their small marketing team.

That said, they were determined to find a solution that would help them implement and manage the Schema Markup on their site at scale and provide their team with guidance to maximize this SEO tactic. After thorough research, Schema App was chosen as the optimal solution.

We wanted a strategic partner who could guide our implementation of Schema Markup, be the hands-on resource to expand upon the markup we already implemented, and maintain all the markup on the site. Schema App checked all of those boxes for us plus some.”

– Katie Schneekloth, Lead Digital Marketing Strategist, Marshfield Clinic

Strategic Content Recommendations

Marshfield’s partnership with Schema App gave them access to content best practices that helped them improve their markup.

Location Pages
Previously, Marshfield Clinic’s location pages displayed hours of operation that were not aligned with Schema.org’s time format. Following their CSM’s recommendations, Marshfield Clinic restructured their hours of operation to align with Schema.org’s preferred formatting.

This straightforward adjustment proved essential: “This is such a simple fix, but we would have never improved this had we not known. There is so much low-hanging fruit we missed out on until we had an expert pointing it all out and knowing what to call out.”

Physicians Pages
Schema App also recommended adding content regarding each physician’s medical specialties and procedures offered to their physician pages. This allowed Marshfield to leverage more Schema.org properties, providing search engines with greater detail about their physicians.

As Marshfield Clinic continues to enhance their content strategy, their CSM advises on which content to include based on the Schema.org vocabulary. This ensures optimal content structuring for easier Schema Markup implementation and nesting on their pages.

The Marshfield Clinic team’s prompt action on these content recommendations has been a key factor in the success of their partnership with Schema App.

Performing Entity Linking at Scale

In addition to achieving rich results and boosting their organic traffic metrics, Marshfield Clinic aimed to further clarify the entities mentioned on their site and improve their knowledge graph using entity linking. Performing entity linking would enable search engines to disambiguate the entities mentioned on their site and surface their pages on the SERP for more relevant search queries.

In support of these goals, Marshfield Clinic was able to utilize Schema App’s Omni Linked Entity Recognition (LER) feature to apply entity linking at scale across Marshfield Clinic’s page sets. Omni LER automatically identifies named entities mentioned in texts and links them to corresponding entities found on other external authoritative knowledge bases within the markup.

Using Omni LER, Marshfield targeted the job-related entities (ex: Obgyn, Internal Medicine, etc.) found in the ‘Provider Bio’ section of their Physician Pages and linked them to the known entities found on Wikipedia, Wikidata and Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Below is an example of the entity “Internal Medicine” being automatically identified on the Physician page and linked to known entities on external authoritative knowledge bases using Omni LER.

When asked what Katie’s take was on the role of knowledge graphs and linked entities in improving SEO, she responded, “as I learn more about AI and how search is changing, improving our knowledge graph and linking to reputable entities that are relevant to our content is what will set us apart and ensure we get quality traffic in this new world of semantic search. In healthcare, there is a lot of similar content coming from a wide variety of health networks. How can we stand out so that patients can find us and know about the exceptional care that we provide over our competitors? The answer is in our knowledge graph and bringing our exceptional service experience directly into search.”

1. Inconsistent Content Across Service Line Pages

Content is crucial to any successful SEO strategy and Sharp HealthCare wanted patients to be able to easily access the right information in their time of need. However, the Sharp HealthCare site had inconsistent content across different service line pages due to differences in content preferences amongst physicians and facilities.

This made it hard for users to navigate the site and find the information they needed. For instance, one of the service pages would contain an FAQ section, while another would completely omit FAQ content altogether. This meant that if a person wanted to find an answer, they had to search through multiple pages.

Sharp knew they had to work on getting consistent content across their site and utilize Schema Markup to help search engines direct searchers to the right pages. Sharp HealthCare launched the ‘One Sharp’ initiative to unify their various departments and create a seamless digital experience.

Their objective was to facilitate comprehensive access to patient queries by:

• Aligning different departments’ content
• Leveraging Schema Markup to help search engines understand their content to provide patients with more accurate search results and achieve rich results to improve the customer journey

2. Lack of Internal Resources

Like most other organizations, Rachael Jones, Product Manager on the Digital Experience team, attempted to implement Schema Markup on her own. It soon became clear that additional expertise was necessary, as attempting to write Schema Markup by hand proved to be complex and time-consuming.

Additionally, the lack of content consistency posed challenges in implementing Schema Markup at scale. With varying content templates, it was difficult to apply Schema Markup consistently, affecting eligibility for rich results and impacting search visibility and overall user experience.

Given the size and complex nature of their website, Sharp HealthCare needed a scalable and dynamic solution to enhance their SEO efforts, prompting them to seek the expertise of Schema App.

1. Easing the Burden on Sharp’s Internal SEO Team

Migrating to a New Content Management System (CMS)

In partnership with Schema App, Sharp HealthCare was able to implement a robust Schema Markup strategy and yield amazing results.

However, Sharp HealthCare still had an ongoing challenge to tackle. Upon reassessing their site performance, Sharp discovered limitations in their existing CMS, which led to issues such as slow site speed and poor user experience on mobile.

Alongside their goal of unifying their branches of care, Sharp aimed to improve their site’s search performance, traffic and conversions, page load times, security, and mobile user experience. To achieve these objectives and provide their content team with greater flexibility in design and functionality, they determined that migrating to a new CMS was necessary.

Migrating to a new CMS is a major project and the Sharp team knew that they would need support from the Schema App team to ensure the content on their new site was consistent and achieving rich results where applicable.

Partnering to Strategize New CMS Content Model

The Schema App team assessed Sharp’s existing pages and provided content recommendations based on the Schema.org vocabulary and best practices they had shared earlier in the engagement.

This enabled Sharp’s content team to optimize their pages with a scalable content model across all of their key pages. It would also prepare them to rebuild their website in a purposeful and semantic way, and stand out with rich results in the SERP when they launch any pages on their new CMS.

The learnings and best practices identified from Schema App’s implementation of Schema Markup on the original site, such as FAQ and Review Schema Markup on Sharp’s physician pages, provided valuable insights for the site migration before it even began. As the site reconstruction rolled out, this allowed Sharp to incorporate large-scale rich result best practices, while also maximizing the semantic SEO on their content and pages.

Throughout the process of building out the page sets, Schema App’s Customer Success Manager partnered with Sharp to coach and guide the Sharp team to ensure that best practices were maintained during the transition.

Focus each page on a specific Schema.org Type / Topic

One of Schema App’s recommendations for Sharp’s content strategy was for each page to focus on one topic that could be represented using a Schema.org Type, for example building out Doctor Pages around Schema.org’s Physician type.

By focusing on one specific topic per page, Sharp could easily create a clear website architecture and identify the key information to include on each page. That way, users would easily find what they were looking for and search engines could clearly understand what the page was about.

During the migration process, the Sharp team applied this recommendation and made sure that each page focused clearly on a specific Schema.org Type when establishing their content structure. They also looked at the Schema.org properties for each type they had chosen and included the content for those properties.

For example, the Physician page was best categorized by Schema.org’s Physician Type. Some of the properties under the Physician Type were availableService, medicalSpecialty and openingHours.

The Sharp team structured the content on every physician page to include information about the physician’s medical specialty, services offered, FAQs about the physician, where the physician was located and reviews of the physician, if available.

By using the Schema.org vocabulary to inform content architecture, the Sharp team could ensure consistent information across different types of pages.

Developing a Schema.org Knowledge Graph for AI

On top of aligning their content with available Schema.org properties, Schema App also authored Sharp’s Schema Markup to nest properties under the main Schema.org type for each page. This is a best practice we call connected Schema Markup.

For example, all Physicians worked for Sharp HealthCare. Therefore, Sharp HealthCare was nested under each Physician’s parentOrganization property. If the page also contained FAQs about a Physician, FAQPage markup would be nested using the subjectOf property.

Nesting establishes relationships between different entities on a website. That way, search engines can understand and contextualize the content on the site, and provide more accurate search results for users.

By connecting the various entities on the Sharp website through nesting and linking to external authoritative knowledge bases, Sharp was able to generate a reusable content knowledge graph.

The connected knowledge graph created through Schema Markup enabled Sharp HealthCare to inform AI search engines about the context and connectivity of their content, facilities, and services. This aligned with their goal of unifying their services as AI advancements progress and content relationships become increasingly important.

In an ever-changing digital marketing landscape, the health systems in the United States are constantly in search of new and effective marketing strategies worth investing in to drive results and stay ahead of the competition.

While the digital marketing team at Baptist Health was aware of schema markup, the team really began to focus their efforts with the launch of their new website in 2020. They knew this SEO strategy would help the organization stay up-to-date and compete on search. And with the website redesign underway, this was the perfect time to start investing in Schema.

In addition, the team frequently found themselves disputing incorrect search results, mistaking their brand with others. Google had a difficult time distinguishing Baptist Health in Jacksonville from the multitude of other, unaffiliated organizations across the United States with the same name. Since Baptist Health is already a well-known and reputable brand in the North Florida area, the marketing team saw schema markup as a great way to provide Google with more clarity about their organization and the services it offers.

Lack of Internal Schema Markup Expertise

It’s no secret that schema markup is a complicated SEO strategy and the Baptist Health team did not have an in-house expert to write the code or develop a robust strategy.

Under the direction of Baptist Health’s Senior Vice President and Chief Consumer Officer Melanie Husk, the team set to work enhancing their technical SEO strategies.

We knew we wanted to invest in schema markup because we had been hearing about its value and wanted to stay up to date with where search is going, but we didn’t know how to implement it on our site because we didn’t have anyone in-house who knew both the nuances of schema and the ability to code.”

– Lauren Anderson, Digital Content Strategist, Baptist Health

They took a first stab by trying to write the schema markup on their own, but without the proper expertise, they didn’t have confidence in the accuracy of their markup. With limited time and resources, having a schema markup expert in-house was off the table. “I could maybe learn all the intricacies of schema – that is a steep learning curve I could possibly climb – but also learn how to write the JSON-LD code as a non-developer and deploy it on every page as we add and change content; our team does not have time for that along with our other marketing responsibilities,” Lauren said.

To overcome their coding problem, the Baptist Health team decided to look for an external vendor to lend them their expertise.

Inability to Maintain Markup at Scale

The team started with an external vendor to help them write the schema markup for each page and manually add it to their site. However, this solution proved to be expensive and not scalable.

Baptist Health has over 8000 URLs on its main website alone and it was impossible for the marketing team to manually update the content on each page. Instead, most of the organization’s content was being fed dynamically from their system to ensure a single source of truth. This included provider profile pages, job listings, clinical trials, locations, and reviews – to name a few.

But the schema markup added to the site by the external vendor was static – which meant that someone had to update the schema markup code manually whenever the content on a page changed to avoid schema drift issues. With so many URLs and constant content updates, the Baptist Health team could not maintain their schema markup manually. The search for a schema markup solution continued.

After their earlier attempts, the Baptist Health team knew that they needed a solution that could:

• Help them implement accurate and robust schema markup at scale
• Update the markup dynamically to align with the content changes on every page
• Add the JSON-LD code to their website without affecting their site speed

At the end of 2020, the team chanced upon Schema App at a conference and upon enquiry, found out that Schema App checked all their boxes for their needs in a schema markup solution.

Limited access to IT resources to implement Schema Markup

Sharp HealthCare’s objective was to extend “The Sharp Experience” into search. They wanted to make their content easily accessible to potential and current patients, so Sharp displays as the first option for all their health care needs.

They agreed Schema Markup was the strategy to achieve this. However, they had limited access to developer resources and wanted to be able to fully leverage Schema Markup opportunities. They searched for an agile Schema Markup solution and expert support to solve their challenge and found Schema App.

Achieving a variety of Rich Results

Schema App created a Schema Markup strategy targeting Sharp Healthcare’s Physicians, Medical Services, Recipe and Health News article pages. With the addition of Schema Markup, they achieved Review Snippets for their Physician pages, FAQ rich results for their location pages, Recipe rich results for their recipes and more. Upon seeing the amazing results from this, Sharp HealthCare found Schema App to be a valuable partner on their journey to bring content to their customers through search.

Zero dependency on IT

Schema App was also able to help Sharp Healthcare implement Schema Markup across the Sharp HealthCare website without needing their web development team. Furthermore, Sharp Healthcare could leverage the Schema App team for ongoing technical support and Schema Markup expertise to guide their Schema Markup implementation.