SEO

SEO on WHA is a combination of plugins (meta, sitemaps, structured data, recommendations), theme-level semantic markup and editorial discipline. This page covers the stack and the day-to-day practices that keep the site healthy in search.

The SEO stack

Per-page SEO (editors)

Every page and post has a Yoast SEO metabox. Fill it in rather than relying on auto-generation:

URL and redirect hygiene

• Don't change a published URL without adding a redirect. The Redirection plugin manages 301s; if a slug changes, map the old URL to the new one. See Managing Redirects.
• Keep the URL hierarchy intact. /providers/ is the listing and /providers/{slug}/ are detail pages (same for /locations/). This structure is good for SEO and UX; renaming it would break the relationship and force another redirect layer.

Structured data

Structured data (schema.org JSON-LD) powers rich results: the star ratings, addresses and hours that show up right in search. For a medical, multi-location site it's high-leverage, feeding both the rich snippets that lift click-through and the local pack on the map.

The theme injects the important schema automatically in wp_head, with no per-page setup:

The provider rating schema is what can surface star ratings in search results, a real click-through lever. The provider AggregateRating comes from Doctor.com patient reviews (synced into the site), not first-party reviews. The ratings aren't ours, and Google decides on its own whether to show review stars at all.

The site-level MedicalOrganization (front page) ties the locations together: each MedicalClinic references it via parentOrganization, and the organization lists every location as a department, so the multi-location group reads as one entity rather than a set of unrelated clinics. Identity comes from site config (name, URL, site icon), with no hardcoded values.

Provider, location and organization schema is already done: automatic, with no upkeep. For anything beyond that (FAQ blocks, service pages or one-off additions), Schema Pro is installed and ready to configure.

How schema sources are split

Three tools can output schema: the theme, Yoast and Schema Pro. Each schema type has a single source, so nothing duplicates:

• The theme is authoritative for the medical entities it emits: MedicalOrganization, Physician, MedicalClinic. Its versions are the richest (ratings, geo, hours, and the @id + department links that tie the locations to the organization).
• Yoast's schema graph is disabled when Schema Pro is active (see the callout near the top), so Yoast handles meta, Open Graph and sitemaps only.
• Schema Pro keeps everything except the global Organization. It still emits WebSite, breadcrumbs, the sitelinks search box, and anything you configure (FAQ, service pages). Only its global Organization is suppressed — via wp_schema_pro_global_schema_enabled — because it would duplicate the theme's richer, linked organization. The theme prints an HTML comment at its Organization so the swap is visible in page source.

Validate output with Google's Rich Results Test.

Schema opportunities

The entity schema (organization, providers, locations) is in place. A couple of higher-effort additions are still open:

• sameAs coverage. The organization links its social profiles (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn). Adding Google Business Profile and Healthgrades URLs — on the organization, and per provider where they exist — would strengthen entity disambiguation; those need to be supplied. Doctor.com is a special case: each provider already stores a doctorcom_id, so a profile link is derivable from data we hold — pending confirmation that the platform exposes a public profile URL worth linking.
• Author / medical-reviewer schema on health articles. Not implemented — articles carry no Article schema with author, reviewedBy or datePublished / dateModified. For YMYL health content this is one of the higher-value E-E-A-T additions (see content credibility).

Sitemaps and crawlability

• XML sitemaps are generated by Yoast at /sitemap_index.xml, covering the public post types (providers, locations, services, life stages, news, articles). Submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and confirm in Yoast which types are set indexable.
• Robots / noindex: control per-page indexing from the Yoast "Advanced" panel. Utility and protected content should be noindex. robots.txt is served dynamically by WordPress (there's no static file); Yoast appends the sitemap reference to it.
• Health-check and admin paths are excluded from caching and shouldn't be indexed (see Caching and Security).

Indexation and rendering

• Non-production is auto-noindexed. Staging and dev force "discourage search engines" by environment (SearchVisibility in yax-common), so only production is crawlable; there's no duplicate staging site to worry about.
• Key listings are server-rendered. Provider, location and service listings render server-side in PHP, so they're in the initial HTML and fully crawlable. The Mapbox maps are progressive enhancement layered on top; the content doesn't depend on JavaScript to be indexed.
• Filtering is AJAX, not parameter URLs. The provider listing's filters (location, specialty, language, role) run through the REST API (wha/v1/providers) and update in place. They don't generate separate ?specialty=… URLs, so there's no faceted index-bloat to manage. Canonicals are self-referencing via Yoast.
• Multilingual / hreflang. Translation is built in but the language switcher is currently disabled in the nav, so no translated URLs are live today. When enabled, DeepL mode renders server-side, cached translations at distinct /{lang}/ paths with proper hreflang and x-default alternates; Google Translate mode is client-side and not separately indexed. If multilingual SEO becomes a goal, the DeepL path is the indexable one.

Performance and SEO

Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor. The theme already helps here:

• Static assets are cache-busted and served by Nginx with long cache lifetimes (Caching).
• Images are offloaded to S3 and automatically converted to WebP; upload at ~2× display size, not full resolution.
• Mapbox/Supercluster load only on pages with maps.

Reference

• Event Tracking: measuring what organic traffic does on-site (behavior and conversions). SEO drives traffic; event tracking measures the outcome. They're complementary, not the same layer.
• Editing Basics: content editing guidelines
• Managing Redirects: 301 workflow
• Accessibility: alt text, semantics and a11y that also benefits SEO