What Is Local Business Schema Markup?
The type that matters most to a local business, because the details it states are the ones customers use to find you and get in touch. Wrong values here do not cost you a search position. They send somebody to a closed shop.
What It Asserts
Name, address, contact details, opening hours, the area served and what the business does. Each is stated as fact. Each is also a detail a customer acts on rather than merely reads.
Name and address. The identifying pair.
Who you are and where you are, stated precisely. These are what connect the site to a real place and they are also what somebody types into a navigation app.
Contact details. Telephone and equivalent.
The number somebody rings. A wrong one here is not a search problem, it is a customer who could not reach you and concluded you had closed.
Opening hours. The most volatile.
When you are open, by day, including any variation. These change more often than anything else asserted here, which is why block seven exists.
Area served. Where you work.
The places you cover, which matters most for businesses that travel. Block six covers the distinction properly.
What the business does. The category.
Which kind of business this is, drawn from the vocabulary's list. Block four covers choosing it accurately rather than aspirationally.
Which Makes Accuracy A Business Problem
Wrong hours in markup can send somebody to a closed shop. That is a customer service failure rather than a technical one. It is what separates this type from every other in this section.
What the failure looks like. A wasted journey.
Somebody checks whether you are open, sees that you are, drives over and finds the door locked. They do not know markup exists. They know you told them you were open.
Why that is worse than a lost result. Somebody was harmed.
Most markup errors cost an opportunity that nobody notices. This one costs a person their afternoon and costs you a customer who now believes you are unreliable.
Why the fault is invisible to you. Nobody reports it.
The person who made the wasted journey does not ring to explain. They go elsewhere. The error keeps operating on the next person exactly as it did on them.
What follows from that. This type needs an owner.
Not a periodic technical review. Somebody in the business who notices when the hours change and knows the site states them, which is a different kind of responsibility from the rest of this subject.
Where the same argument runs. The profile.
Our Google Business Profile material makes an identical case about listings, for the same reason: those details are acted on rather than read.
It Must Match Everything Else
The markup, the page, the profile and any directory listings should all say the same thing. Where they disagree, every one of them is weakened, since nothing can tell which is right.
What has to agree. Four places.
What the markup asserts, what the page displays, what your business profile says and what any listings elsewhere carry. Four copies of the same facts, maintained by different people at different times.
Why disagreement is costly. It undermines the claim.
A business asserting one address in markup and showing another on the page has made itself less credible than one asserting nothing. Contradiction is worse than silence.
The most frequent mismatch. Formatting rather than substance.
The same address written four different ways, the same number with and without a code, the business name with and without a suffix. None is wrong and none matches, which is enough to weaken the connection.
What to do about it. Decide the canonical version.
Write the details once, exactly as they should appear, then use that form everywhere. That is a fifteen minute exercise nobody does.
Where the wider argument sits. The profile cluster.
Our Google Business Profile material makes the consistency case in full. This page is where it becomes something asserted rather than merely displayed.
Choose The Right Type
More specific categories exist beneath the general one. Using the specific version where it exists is better. Inventing a category that does not exist achieves nothing at all.
Why specific is better. It says more.
Describing a business as a plumbing service rather than as a business generally states something useful. The narrower term carries information the broader one does not.
How to find the right one. Check the vocabulary.
The list of available categories is published and browsable. Whether one fits your trade is a matter of looking rather than guessing.
What to do when none fits. Use the general one.
Not every trade has a specific category. Where none applies, the general type with an accurate description is the correct answer.
What not to do. Invent one.
A category that is not in the vocabulary is not recognised, so asserting it achieves precisely nothing while looking like an implementation. This happens more than it should.
Multiple Locations
A business with several premises needs one page per location. A single page asserting several addresses is a mess. It is the most frequent structural error with this type.
Why one page each. Each is a separate place.
Every premises has its own address, its own hours and frequently its own phone number. Those are properties of a place rather than of the company, so each needs somewhere to be stated.
What happens without that. Contradiction on one page.
A page asserting three addresses and three sets of hours has made three incompatible claims about one thing. Nothing can resolve that, so it is treated as unreliable rather than as three locations.
What each location page needs. Genuine content.
Not a duplicated template with the town changed, which our risky practices material covers. A page describing that branch, its area and its people.
How the company fits in. Separately.
The business as a whole is described once, site-wide, which is what organisation markup is for. The locations sit beneath it.
Service Area Businesses
A business customers visit and one that travels to customers are described differently. Getting the distinction wrong misrepresents how the business actually works.
What a visited business asserts. A place.
An address customers can attend, with hours describing when the door is open. The address is the point and it is genuinely where trade happens.
What a travelling business asserts. An area.
The places served, with hours describing when somebody can be reached rather than when premises are open. A plumber, an electrician or a mobile therapist works this way.
Why the difference matters. The address means something else.
A travelling business has an address and it is an office or a home rather than somewhere customers go. Asserting it as a place to visit invites somebody to turn up.
The mixed case. Both, stated accurately.
Some businesses have premises and also travel. That is describable, provided the hours attached to the premises are the hours the premises is open.
Where the same distinction matters. The profile.
Our Google Business Profile material handles the identical split. The two should agree about which kind of business yours is.
Opening Hours Change And Markup Does Not
Seasonal and holiday hours are the largest source of stale assertions in this entire subject. Nothing updates itself, which means this needs somebody rather than good intentions.
Why hours go stale so reliably. They change temporarily.
A shop closing early over a holiday, opening longer in summer, shutting for a fortnight. Each is a real change and none of them prompts anybody to think about markup.
What the vocabulary allows. Exceptions.
Special hours for particular dates can be described alongside the regular pattern. Almost nobody uses this. It exists precisely for the holiday problem.
What most businesses do instead. Nothing.
The regular hours stay asserted through the closure, so the site states you are open while the door is locked. That is block two's failure, arriving predictably every year.
What a workable habit looks like. Attach it to something existing.
Whoever changes the hours on the door or the profile updates the site at the same time. Adding it to a job somebody already does is the only version that survives.
The alternative worth considering. Assert less.
A business that will not maintain hours is better off not asserting them than asserting them wrongly. Nothing is preferable to false.
What It Does Not Do
This markup does not create a business profile, does not affect one you have and does not influence what appears on a map. The two are separate systems and businesses confuse them constantly.
What a profile is. A separate thing entirely.
A listing you claim and manage directly, which is what produces the panel and the map result. It has its own details, its own reviews and its own management.
What the confusion produces. Editing the wrong thing.
Somebody wanting to correct their map listing changes the markup on their site and waits. Nothing happens, because the two were never connected in that direction.
Why they still both matter. Consistency.
The markup does not feed the profile and both describe the same business. Where they disagree, the disagreement is visible to anything reading both, which is block three's argument.
What else it does not do. Two things.
It does not put you on a map. It does not produce star ratings either. Those come from the profile and from reviews, which the star ratings page covers.
Where the boundary sits. Two pages.
This type describes a place or a service area. Organisation markup describes the business itself. The full series is on the schema and structured data guide.
Wrong hours send
somebody to a
closed shop.
They will not ring to tell you, so the error keeps working on the next person. We write your details once in a single canonical form, use that everywhere, then make sure whoever changes the hours on the door changes them on the site at the same time.
On every page we build:
A business that will not maintain its hours is better off not asserting them at all.
Every guide.
One practice.
What structured data is, which types apply to your business, how to test it, where the results features come from and what to do when nothing appears.
