Schema Markup for Local Business: Telling Search Engines Who You Are, Precisely
Structured data is a way of stating your name, address, hours and services in a form machines read without guessing. Done honestly, it removes ambiguity.
Schema markup for local business is a way of describing your company to search engines in a format that leaves nothing to guesswork. A human reading your contact page understands at once which line is the telephone number and which is the address. A machine has to infer it. Structured data, written using the schema.org vocabulary, labels each fact, so that your name, opening hours, services and reviews are unambiguous. It is not magic, and it is not a ranking trick, but it is a cheap and tidy way to remove confusion.
How it looks in practice
The most common format is JSON-LD, a small block of data placed in the page that is invisible to visitors. It begins by declaring the type of thing being described, perhaps a plumber, a dentist or a more general local business, and then lists properties such as name, address, telephone number, opening hours, price range and the URL of the logo. Google recommends JSON-LD, and it keeps the labels separate from the visible design, which makes it easier to maintain.
Choose the most specific type that is true
Schema.org offers many types of business, from accountancy practices to restaurants and electricians. Use the most specific one that honestly fits, rather than a vague catch-all. If you are a restaurant, say so, and add the cuisine served and a link to the menu. If you have several branches, create a separate description for each, with its own address and opening hours, rather than squeezing them into one.
Make it match the page
Google's guidelines say that markup must describe content that is visible to users. Do not mark up opening hours that appear nowhere on the page, reviews that are not shown or services you do not offer. Mismatches can lead to the markup being ignored or to a manual action against the site. Treat the markup as a description of the page, not an advertisement.
Add what helps people choose
Beyond the basics, consider properties that answer real questions: the areas you serve, payment methods accepted, the languages spoken, accessibility features and links to your profiles on other sites. For a site with frequently asked questions, FAQ markup may help, although search engines have reduced how often they show such features, so do it for clarity, not for a guaranteed display. Where you sell products, product markup can describe prices and availability, which must be kept up to date.
Reviews need extra care
Review markup is tightly policed. Do not mark up reviews of your own business written by yourself, and avoid marking up a rating copied from another site. Only reviews genuinely collected and shown on the page should be described, and the aggregate figures must be calculated from them honestly.
Test it, and keep it current
After adding markup, use Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator to check for errors. Then watch the enhancements reports in Search Console, which flag problems over time. Update the markup whenever the business changes, because stale opening hours in the code are as misleading as stale ones on the page. Build the data from one source, such as your site's settings, so that they can never disagree.
Where it fits in the bigger picture
Common mistakes we find
The most frequent errors are quite ordinary. Plug-ins generate several overlapping blocks of markup that disagree with each other. A site is redesigned and the old opening hours remain in the hidden code. A business marks itself up as an organisation on every page but never as a local business with an address. Or a developer copies a block from another firm and forgets to change the telephone number. A short audit with a validator, repeated after each redesign, catches nearly all of them.
Link the dots between your profiles
A property called sameAs lets you list the web addresses of your profiles elsewhere, such as your Google Business Profile, trade association listing and social accounts. This helps machines connect them as one entity. Keep the list short and accurate, and include only profiles you control and keep current.
Structured data supports good fundamentals but cannot replace them: a complete business profile, clear pages for each service, genuine reviews and a fast, accessible site. If you would like us to check or create the markup for your business, it is a quick job with a lasting benefit.