Why it matters for a small business site
It takes out the guesswork: search engines can read your opening hours or prices as facts instead of working them out from the text. It can make a page eligible for richer search listings and gives AI tools clean facts to quote, but it guarantees neither.
How to check yours
- Paste your address into Google’s Rich Results Test to see which structured data it finds and whether it’s valid.
- Use the Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org) to check everything else on the page.
- Compare what the markup says with what the page shows. They should match.
What good looks like
JSON-LD, the format Google recommends, using the schema.org types that fit: Organization or LocalBusiness for the business, Product with a price on product pages, BreadcrumbList, and Article for posts. Every fact in it is also visible on the page.
Common mistakes
- Marking up reviews, ratings or FAQs that aren’t shown on the page.
- Copying another site’s markup and leaving their details in it.
- Expecting FAQ rich results. Since 2023, Google shows them only for a small set of well-known government and health sites.
- Adding it once and forgetting to update it when prices or hours change.