The Trust Signals Google Can Actually Read on Your Site
Hospital credentialing committees don’t read your résumé and decide you seem trustworthy. They pull your NPI number and check it against the registry.
They call the state board to confirm the license is current and clear of any review. They run your malpractice history through the National Practitioner Data Bank, and whatever you wrote in your cover letter never enters into it.
Every step is a discrete, checkable field against a primary source.
Your twenty years of careful practice matter enormously to your patients, and to the credentialing algorithm they’re invisible, because an algorithm can’t read twenty years of careful practice. It reads fields.
Google’s ranking system works the same way. That’s worth sitting with for a moment, because many practices build their websites as if the opposite were true.
What “expertise” means to a system that can’t evaluate expertise
Google talks about rewarding expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google’s own testimony in the DOJ antitrust case points somewhere narrower and more useful.
Ranking runs on signals a machine can extract and check. Nobody at Google, and nothing in Google’s index, sits down and forms a view about whether you’re a good doctor.
What the system has is a set of structured signals it can parse mechanically, the same way the credentialing office reads an NPI number and stops there.
That distinction matters for how you spend your time.
A beautifully written About page that never states your board certification in a form a machine can extract does less for you than a plain, boring line of structured data saying this is a licensed physician, board-certified in this specialty, practicing at this address.
The About page reads as prose to a crawler. The structured line reads as a field, and the field is the part that gets used the way you meant it.
The fields that actually get checked
Name, address, phone, consistent everywhere. Say your website lists Suite 210 and your Google Business Profile still says Suite 200, because you moved two years ago and forgot one listing.
The system cross-referencing business listings for confidence treats that as a real discrepancy. A dermatology practice with three online addresses looks, mechanically, like three separate entities, or like one unreliable one, and neither reading helps you.
It’s the most common structural failure independent practices carry, and it’s fixable in an afternoon of checking every directory listing against the current, correct address.
Author markup tied to a real, verifiable person. A blog post about eczema treatment with no byline is anonymous to the system, however good the medical writing is.
Attribute that same post to “Dr. Sarah Chen, board-certified dermatologist,” give her a bio page that states her medical school, residency, and license number, and add schema markup that formally connects the author field to that bio page, and you’ve made a structured claim Google can check.
That’s what turns a name on a page into a doctor with a verifiable identity.
A contact page that resolves to a real place. It needs the practice’s actual address, actual phone number, and ideally an embedded map, matching the business listing exactly.
A contact form floating in a template does none of that work.
Sounds too simple to matter. It’s one of the fields most consistently missing or wrong.
Working HTTPS, no mixed content, no broken security. The padlock is a basic technical claim that the connection is what it says it is, checkable the same way a licensure lookup is checkable.
A practice site still serving parts of itself over plain HTTP, or throwing a certificate warning, fails a structural check before a patient ever reads a word.
A review corpus with real structure, arriving steadily. Individual five-star reviews read as testimonials.
What registers as a signal is a corpus that accumulates at a believable pace, from patients whose activity pattern looks like real patients rather than a burst purchased in a week, and that’s marked up so the system can associate it with the correct business listing.
Volume matters less than whether the pattern looks like something a real practice generates over time, because that pattern is itself checkable.
What none of this measures
None of these fields measure whether you’re a good doctor. Your patients already know that from the exam room, and no schema markup will ever capture it.
The bedside manner that makes a patient trust you with a hard diagnosis, the years you’ve spent building a reputation in your town, the referral network of other physicians who send you their hardest cases, all of it sits outside anything a machine can read.
An algorithm built to parse structured data was never built to perceive any of that, and no amount of good writing on your About page changes what it’s built to do.
So the machine-readable layer ends up being the only part of your reputation visible to the system that decides whether to show your practice to a patient searching nearby.
Anything true about your care that never gets translated into a checkable field is, as far as that system can tell, absent.
Three things to line up
Pull up your Google Business Profile, your website’s contact page, and one directory listing you haven’t looked at in a year, side by side, and check that the name, address, and phone number match character for character across all three.
Then open your two or three most-read blog posts and confirm each one carries a named author with a working link to a bio page that states real credentials.
Then check the site in a browser for any mixed-content warning.
None of that requires a redesign. It’s the discipline you already bring to a chart note, applied to the fields Google can read, so what’s there is correct, current, and verifiable against the primary source.
Questions practices ask about this
How do I find out if my practice's address and phone are wrong somewhere online?
Search your practice name plus your city and open the first three pages of results, then check your Google Business Profile, Healthgrades, Vitals, Yelp, your insurance panel directories, and any hospital affiliation page. Look for old suite numbers, a former location, a fax line sitting in the phone field, and a doctor's name listed where the practice name belongs. Write down every version you find before you change anything.
Can my office manager handle this, or do I need to hire someone?
Listing cleanup is genuinely in-house work, since it's mostly logging into each directory and correcting fields. Schema markup is different, because it's code in the page template, so you need whoever maintains the site or a CMS plugin that generates it. Google's Rich Results Test will tell you whether what you added actually parses. Plan on outside help if the site is custom built and no one on staff can touch the template.
What should I ask a vendor to include if I hand this work off?
Ask for a written list of every listing they'll claim or correct, with the address and phone exactly as they'll enter it, plus the logins handed back to you at the end. Have them validate any schema they add in Google's Rich Results Test and show you the result. Get before and after screenshots of each directory, and agree on who keeps the listings current afterward.
How long after I fix my listings before anything changes in search?
Google Business Profile edits usually show within a few days. Third-party directories move slower, anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months, because some of them pull from data aggregators on their own refresh schedule. Schema gets picked up the next time that page is crawled. Movement in where you actually rank is slower still and depends on much more than these fields.
Photograph: Atlantic Ambience / Pexels