Customer Story
How Marshfield Clinic Leveraged Schema Markup to Improve Search Traffic & Prepare for AI Search
Marshfield Clinic Health System is an integrated health system serving Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Its mission is to enrich lives through accessible, affordable, and compassionate healthcare.
The system comprises 1,600 providers with 170 specialties, a health plan, and research and education programs. It operates over 60 Marshfield Clinic locations, 11 hospitals, Marshfield Children’s Hospital, Marshfield Clinic Research Institute, Security Health Plan, and Marshfield Clinic Health System Foundation.
Challenge
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
Solutions
Access to Schema Markup Best Practices & Timely Industry News
When Marshfield Clinic sought out a Schema Markup solution, they ultimately wanted a strategic partner who was an expert in Schema Markup to guide them through a managed process. This need was more than just about implementing Schema Markup; it was about ensuring that they stayed ahead of industry trends and utilized the most effective practices available.
Through their partnership with Schema App, Marshfield received exactly what they needed.
They were assigned a Schema App Customer Success Manager (CSM), who started off the engagement by helping them to author and deploy accurate Schema Markup to their services, location, and physician pages. Their CSM also connected the key entities on their site, which enabled Marshfield to develop their content knowledge graph.
After the initial implementation, Katie and her team regularly met with their CSM, who brought industry best practices, content recommendations, and strategic insights to every conversation.
We 100% rely on our CSM and their expertise. We need someone doing the technical work for us and bringing strategy into the conversation. They tell us what they’re seeing from an expert perspective, and share best practices to navigate and leverage any changes. They also point out different things evolving in AI and the search industry as a whole. I see a lot of value in having that in a partner to help decipher what’s important and call it out to us.
– Katie Schneekloth
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.
“Linking entities to form our organization’s knowledge graph is the foundational backbone that must be in place to ensure we’re offering the best care digitally. It allows us to meet our patients in their moment of need, at the start of their health journey. With the right information presented earlier in their search, they can come to us and get care quicker. Connected Schema Markup behind the scenes is critical to being where we need to be, in the right context with the right information, to provide the best care to our patients.” – Katie Schneekloth
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.”
Katie Schneekloth
Lead Digital Marketing Strategist
Marshfield Clinic Health System
Working with Schema App, I have a partner who not only helps get the hands-on work done but also helps us understand the world of Schema and where things are heading. The team is hands-on but also a strategic partner for us, providing well-rounded value. So much is changing in the SEO industry, and through this partnership, we have a strategic partner to guide us along the way and keep taking things to the next level to stay ahead of the curve.