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Google ignoring LocalBusiness sub-categories?

Webmasters Asked by rogerkk on November 3, 2021

I’m working for a review website, where we (of course) want a reference to our reviews to show up in the Local Business listing in the Google search results. The local businesses are various medical clinics.

When testing with the Rich Result Test tool in the search console I see there is no local business element found/listed if I use either MedicalOrganization or MedicalBusiness schemas, but if I use either LocalBusiness or Hospital there is.

I expect that for MedicalOrganization it is because it’s not a subtype of LocalBusiness, but I really don’t understand why MedicalBusiness doesn’t work, as it is a subtype and is more precise than just using LocalBusiness.

Can anyone help me understand the cause of this behaviour?


In case it’s relevant, here are a couple of examples:

  1. Clinic using the Hospital schema. Shows "Local Business" section in testing tool by default, but not if switching to MedicalOrganization or MedicalBusiness
  2. Clinic using MedicalOrganization. Does not show "Local Business" section in testing tool by default or switching to MedicalBusiness, but does show it when set to LocalBusiness or Hospital.

2 Answers

For MedicalOrganisation, I agree with your assessment. It is not a sub-type of LocalBusiness, which is a requirement in Google's specification. But MedicalBusiness, as you say, is a sub-type of LocalBusiness and so should work, as many other sub-types do.

My guess is it's a bug. You can report this via the "Send Feedback" link at the top of Google's specification page.

To actually solve your problem, why not use MedicalClinic? It validates, and seems to match your use case.

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Answered by GDVS on November 3, 2021

You can use schema's additionalType property in order to add more specific types from external vocabularies. By adding additionalType for MedicalBusiness under LocalBusiness your schema will look like this.

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https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.legelisten.no%2Fklinikker%2F7088-aleris-colosseum-nobel

However I fail to understand why you want to do this. Why do you want the local business element to show up? Why not just use a more specific sub-type like MedicalBusiness etc.?

Answered by Nina Dubovich on November 3, 2021

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