What Schema Markup Is
Schema markup is structured data added to your website’s code that explicitly labels what things are as follows:
- The business name
- Opening times
- The company’s services
- Company reviews
- Social media
- Areas covered
- And much more
It’s based on a shared vocabulary maintained at schema.org, a project backed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, so the same markup is understood consistently across search engines.
Without it, a search engine or AI tool has to infer what your page is about from surrounding text, which works reasonably well most of the time but leaves room for mistakes. With it, there’s no ambiguity: your opening hours are your opening hours, not just a paragraph of text that mentions “9am to 5pm”.
Why It Matters More Now
Google’s structured data guidelines explain how this markup can unlock rich results in search, star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, event listings, and more, all pulled directly from your schema.
But the bigger shift is what’s happening beyond traditional search. As AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s own AI Overviews increasingly answer questions directly rather than sending someone to click through ten links, they lean on structured, unambiguous data more than ever. A page with a clean LocalBusiness schema, name, address, phone number, opening hours, and services offered is simply easier for a machine to summarise correctly than a page relying entirely on prose.
The Most Useful Schema Types for Small Businesses
For most local and service businesses, three schema types cover the bulk of what’s useful:
- Local Business: your name, address, phone number, opening hours, and geographic area, so you’re accurately represented wherever your business gets mentioned.
- Service: a clear description of what you offer, useful if you run multiple distinct services under one business.
- FAQ Page: If you’ve got a genuine FAQ section, this schema can surface individual questions and answers directly in search results.
How to Check If You Have It
Google’s Rich Results Test will show you exactly what structured data Google can currently see on any page; paste in your URL and it’ll tell you what’s there and what’s missing.
What This Looks Like Done Properly
I build the LocalBusiness and Service schema into every WordPress site I develop as standard, alongside the on-page SEO fundamentals, proper heading structure, meta descriptions, and clean crawlability that make up my web design & development service. It’s the kind of foundational work that’s far cheaper to get right from the start than to retrofit later.
If you’re not sure whether your site has proper schema in place, get in touch and I’ll take a look for you.
