Chapter five covered which schema types matter and why. This lesson is the implementation detail for the one that matters most: the markup identifying your practice as a real business at a real place.
Choosing the type
Both LocalBusiness and MedicalClinic describe a business at a location, and MedicalClinic is a more specific descendant of it. Prefer the more specific type where it genuinely fits, since specificity is the point of the exercise.
Practical guidance:
- MedicalClinic for a clinic where patients are treated. Right for most interventional psychiatry practices.
- LocalBusiness as a safe fallback if the medical types do not fit your structure.
- Physician on individual clinician bios, in addition to the clinic markup, not instead of it.
Do not use several competing business types on one page. One entity per page.
The properties that matter
Include these on each office page:
- name — the canonical practice name, no keywords.
- address — a structured postal address with street, suite, city, region, postal code, and country as separate properties rather than one string.
- telephone — the canonical number for that office.
- url — that office page.
- geo — latitude and longitude of the entrance patients should use.
- openingHoursSpecification — structured hours, including any exceptions.
- image — a real photograph.
- medicalSpecialty — psychiatry.
- availableService — the treatments provided at this office.
- sameAs — links to your Business Profile and significant directory listings.
- parentOrganization — where offices belong to one practice entity.
The suite belongs in the address as its own property. Collapsing it into the street line is the most common structural error, and it is exactly the detail that breaks matching.
Multi-location implementation
This is where template-driven sites cause damage. Each office page must carry markup for that office only.
- Never output the same address on every location page. It is common, it is automatic, and it destroys per-location clarity.
- Give each office its own geographic coordinates. Do not reuse the city centre or the head office.
- Use parentOrganization to relate offices to the practice, rather than pretending they are unrelated businesses.
- Put Organization markup on the homepage describing the practice as a whole.
The consistency rule
The single most important thing about this markup: it must agree exactly with the visible page, your Business Profile, and your canonical record.
Markup contradicting your own footer adds ambiguity rather than removing it, which is worse than having no markup at all. Generate it from your single source of truth so it cannot drift when a phone number changes.
What to leave out
- Self-authored review or aggregateRating markup. Restricted, and it can trigger warnings.
- priceRange, unless meaningful and accurate.
- Properties describing things not on the page.
- Efficacy language inside service descriptions, which carries the same exposure as visible copy.
- Invented properties. Stick to the vocabulary.
Validating and maintaining
- Use JSON-LD in a script tag rather than inline microdata. It is easier to maintain and to generate.
- Validate every page type with a structured data testing tool after publishing.
- Re-validate after any site change, move, rename, or phone change.
- Check that Search Console is not reporting structured data errors.
- Include markup in your quarterly audit, comparing it field by field against the canonical record.
Markup is not a ranking trick. It is how you state your identity unambiguously to every system that needs to resolve you, which is why it recurs in both the AI chapter and this one. E-E-A-T is next.