Hi team,
I have a healthcare client on Answers who is looking to us for our recommendation for providers that serve at multiple locations. They currently have provider entities set up with 1 primary location, i.e. Joe Smith in Washington DC, but they also want Joe to appear in results where he may also serve like Baltimore for “providers in Baltimore”.
I know sometimes we recommend having duplicate entities per location i.e. 1 Joe Smith in Washington DC and 1 Joe Smith in Baltimore, but my concern would be that 2 providers would appear in a search for “Joe Smith”.
Do we have examples or best practices we can point to? Thank you!
Hi Hannah,
Creating multiple entities for those providers would be the best way to ensure that users in both areas get the most accurate results for providers in their area. If a user searches for a specific provider and gets multiple results back, they will have enough information to decide which location they would like to see that provider at. The results will be sorted by nearest entity, ensuring users get the most relevant results.
See a live client example here:
This works similarly with Listings - we recommend having multiple entities in the Knowledge Graph for each location a provider serves, to ensure users get the most accurate information.
Thanks @Kristy_Huang ! Do we have a way to avoid showing duplicative results when the user searches by name? i.e. searching “Richard Hamilton” here and seeing 2 results for Richard might be confusing for the user, versus removing the address from the card and just having a single “Richard Hamilton” result. I’m thinking especially for providers that have several locations it might make more sense to collapse their entities into a single card.
