Schema and FAQ pages for dental practices

8 October 2026 4 min read Dr. Marcus Vance

Laptop on a clinic desk showing a dental practice website with an FAQ list

Dental sites either ignore structured data or spray every schema.org type they found in a plugin. Neither helps. The useful set is small: a DentalClinic / LocalBusiness record that matches the Google profile, Article markup on guides, and FAQPage only where you asked a question a human would actually type.

Practice manager writing notes at a dental clinic desk — Schema is just a machine-readable version of the answers you should already be willing to put on the page.

Start with the practice, not the plugin

Name, address, geo, opening hours, telephone, URL, and the same medical speciality you claim on the site. If you have two locations, do not emit one mashed clinic. If you are not taking NHS patients, do not let a leftover MedicalClinic template say otherwise. Invalid or contradictory schema is worse than none because it teaches the search engine not to trust you.

FAQ pages that earn the markup

Good dental FAQs are operational: “Do you see children on the NHS?”, “How long is an implant assessment?”, “Is parking at the back?”, “Do you offer 0% finance on treatment plans?”, “What should I do if I have swelling at the weekend?”. Bad FAQs are twelve ways of saying you are gentle and modern. Google has been picky about FAQ rich results; write them for the patient first. If a rich result appears, that is a bonus.

Put the answers on the relevant treatment or contact page, not only on a dumping-ground /faq/ that nobody links. Markup the questions that are visible. Do not hide a second set of schema questions the visitor cannot see.

Articles and reviews

Journal posts and ranking guides should emit Article with a real author, a date, and the publisher you actually are. Do not mark up agency reviews you did not collect. Do not invent aggregate ratings. The GDC and the search engine are oddly aligned here: do not dress advertising as a clinical fact.

A maintenance habit

When hours change, change the schema. When a clinician leaves, change the page and the markup. Validate with a rich-results test after theme updates. Schema is not a launch task. It is the machine echo of the same facts you already owe the person in the car park.

LocalBusiness details that drift

Schema that still lists a retired associate as the only dentist is worse than no schema. Same for a phone number you ported last year. Tie the JSON-LD to the same fields you edit for the footer and the Google profile. If a developer hard-coded the graph in the theme, move it to a place a practice manager can change, or accept that it will be wrong by Easter. Wrong structured data is a confident lie to a machine.

Do not mark up opening hours that include a lunch close if the Google profile says you are open. The two graphs will fight, and Maps usually wins. The website’s job is to agree.

When not to use FAQ schema

If the questions are sales copy, “Why are we the leading cosmetic dentist in the county?”, do not mark them up. If you have one genuine question, one FAQ node is enough. If you change an answer, change the markup the same day. And if Google stops rewarding FAQ rich results tomorrow, you still have a page a human can use. That is the test. Schema is a translation layer. It cannot invent a practice that answers the phone.

A short inventory that is enough

For most UK practices the useful graph is: the clinic, the main pages as WebPage, Article on anything editorial, BreadcrumbList if the theme can keep it true, and FAQ on the handful of operational questions. Skip JobPosting unless you are hiring. Skip Event unless you are really running an evening. Skip the twenty extra types a Yoast-style panel will tick if you let it. Every extra type is another thing to keep honest when the practice changes.

Re-validate after a redesign. Theme switches silently drop or duplicate graphs. A duplicate LocalBusiness with last year’s phone is a common leftover. Search Console will not always shout. A patient who calls the old number will.

When you publish a new journal piece, emit Article and stop. Do not also mark it as a MedicalWebPage with invented contraindications. Editorial is editorial. Clinical advice belongs on a page a dentist has signed, with a date. Mixing the two in markup is how a notes article about landing pages starts looking, to a machine, like treatment guidance you never meant to give.