What Is Organisation Schema Markup?
The type that connects a website to the business behind it. Its most useful property is the one nobody talks about: listing where else your organisation exists online, so those scattered presences resolve to a single business rather than a repeated name.
It Describes The Business, Not The Building
Local business markup describes a place customers visit or an area you cover. This describes the organisation itself. They overlap and are not the same. Using the wrong one is the usual structural error with either.
What each is about. A company against a location.
The organisation is the legal and commercial entity: its name, who it is, where it exists online. The local business is somewhere you trade from, with an address, hours and a door.
Why they overlap. A single-site business is both.
A shop with one premises is an organisation and a location simultaneously, which is why the distinction feels academic until you have two branches or none at all.
When it stops being academic. Two situations.
A business with several premises has one organisation and several locations. A business with no premises customers visit has an organisation and arguably no location at all.
Which to use. Frequently both.
The organisation described once for the business, then local business markup on any page describing a place or a service area.
What goes wrong. Using one for the other.
Describing a company as a location invites people to visit an office. Describing a location as an organisation loses the hours and address customers need.
What It Asserts
The name of the business, its logo, how to contact it and the other places it exists online. Four groups of claim, each straightforward and each easy to leave stale.
The name. What the business is called.
Including any alternative form people use. Worth getting exactly right, since this is the value everything else is anchored to and inconsistency here undermines the rest.
The logo. The mark that represents you.
A stated image identifying the business. Modest, though useful where anything displays a logo alongside a name.
Contact details. How somebody reaches you.
Telephone, contact points and the purposes they serve, since a sales line and a support line are different things. Businesses commonly assert one number long after adding others.
The other places you exist. The interesting one.
Your profiles, listings and presences elsewhere on the web, stated as belonging to this business. Block three covers why this is the property worth caring about.
What else can be described. Founding and structure.
When it was established, who founded it, whether it belongs to a parent company. Optional, though useful for businesses where those facts genuinely matter.
The Same-As Property Is The Interesting One
Listing your organisation's other profiles and listings states that they are all the same business. That is how a company stops being a repeated name and becomes something resolvable.
What the problem is. A name is ambiguous.
Your business name appears in many places, with other businesses possibly sharing similar names. Nothing inherently connects your site to your profiles, nor distinguishes you from a namesake.
What listing them does. Draws the connection explicitly.
Stating that this site, that profile and this directory entry all belong to one organisation removes the guesswork. The scattered presences become evidence about one business rather than several possible ones.
Why that matters. Being understood as one thing.
A business identified as a single entity can have information about it accumulated correctly. One that reads as several similar names cannot, which is the argument our advanced material makes about entities in general.
What to list. Only what you control.
Profiles you own and manage. Directory entries you claimed. Not a listing somebody else created, not a profile you have never accessed, nor a page about you that you do not run.
Why that limit matters. It is still an assertion.
Listing something states it is yours. Asserting a connection to a profile you do not control is a claim you cannot stand behind. It can also attach somebody else's content to your business.
Consistency Is The Whole Point
The details asserted here should match your profile, your listings and your pages. Where they disagree, the connection this markup exists to make is undermined by the markup itself.
Why disagreement defeats the purpose. It weakens the link.
The point of connecting your presences is establishing that they are one business. If the name and number differ between them, you have connected things that appear to describe different organisations.
Where the differences come from. Time and people.
Profiles created years apart by different people, each entering details slightly differently. Nobody was careless. The accumulated variation is still a problem.
What usually varies. The same four things.
The legal suffix on the name, whether the number carries a country code, the address format, then which of several trading names was used. All minor and all enough to weaken a match.
What to do. One canonical version.
Write the details once, exactly as they should appear, then use that form in the markup, on the site and in every profile. The local business page makes the same recommendation for premises.
Why this page is where it bites. You are asserting the link.
Elsewhere inconsistency is a missed opportunity. Here you have explicitly claimed these things are the same business, which makes any disagreement between them your own contradiction.
Which Organisation Type
More specific organisation types exist beneath the general one. Using an accurate one is better than the generic version. The same warning applies as everywhere else in this section.
What the narrower types cover. Kinds of organisation.
Educational institutions, medical organisations, government bodies, charities, financial services and others. Each was added because that kind of body has properties a general company does not.
Why accurate is better. It says more.
Describing a school as an educational institution rather than as an organisation carries information. The narrower term is understood without inference, which is the whole purpose here.
When to stay general. Most businesses.
A trade, a professional practice or a retailer usually has no narrower type that fits properly. The general one with accurate details is correct rather than a compromise.
What not to do. Choose for the sound of it.
Selecting a more impressive category than the business fits asserts something false for no benefit, since the term is read rather than admired.
The related decision. Whether a location type applies too.
Where the business also has premises, that is a separate description rather than a different choice of type here.
Where It Belongs
This description belongs site-wide rather than on individual pages. Repeating it inconsistently across templates is the error that follows from not deciding that.
Why site-wide. The business does not change per page.
Your organisation is the same on every page, so describing it once and referring to that description everywhere is both accurate and simpler to maintain.
What repeating produces. Drift.
Where each template carries its own copy, they diverge. A number updated in one and not another produces a site asserting two different contact details for the same business.
Why that is worse than it sounds. Self-contradiction.
A site disagreeing with itself about its own telephone number is a poor advertisement for the accuracy of anything else it asserts.
What to check. One page of each kind.
Compare the organisation description on a guide, a service page and a contact page. Where they differ, the description was duplicated rather than shared.
How ours is arranged. Described once.
One description of Lillian Purge Ltd, referred to from every page including this one, so a change to a contact detail changes everywhere at once.
It Does Not Create A Knowledge Panel
Describing your organisation does not produce one of the information panels that appear beside results. Those are assembled from many sources and cannot be requested, which is worth knowing before anybody proposes work to obtain one.
What a panel is. An assembly.
Information gathered from many places and presented together. Your own description is one input among a great many, most of which are outside your control entirely.
What markup contributes. Something rather than everything.
Being clear about who you are and where you exist is a reasonable contribution to that picture. It is not the mechanism. Treating it as one leads to disappointment.
Why nobody can promise one. There is no route.
No submission process exists and no supplier has access to one. Anybody offering to obtain a panel is describing something they cannot control.
What actually influences it. Being notable elsewhere.
Coverage, references and presences across the web that establish a business as a recognised thing. That is earned over time rather than implemented.
Where the features are covered. Their own page.
Google SERP features explained sets out which features involve markup and which do not. Panels are firmly in the second group.
One business,
not a repeated
name.
Nothing inherently connects your site to your profiles. Other businesses may share similar names too. We describe your organisation once, list only the presences you actually control and use one canonical version of your details everywhere.
On every page we build:
Nobody can obtain you a knowledge panel. There is no submission process to use.
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.
