Schema markup for local service businesses, in plain English

Schema markup is a block of machine-readable notes attached to a page that says, in a standard vocabulary, what the page is about: this is a business, this is its name, these are its services. It removes guesswork. It is not a ranking trick and it will not rescue a page with nothing on it, but on a page that already says something true it is the cheapest way to be understood exactly.

What it actually is

A page of HTML says how something should look. It does not say what it means. A phone number and a fax number look identical to a machine, and so do an opening time and a price.

Structured data solves that by adding a separate block, usually JSON-LD in a <script> tag, that labels the facts explicitly. It is invisible to visitors and unambiguous to everything else. If you are choosing a format, Google settles the argument in its introduction to structured data: it “recommends using JSON-LD for structured data if your site’s setup allows it, as it’s the easiest solution for website owners to implement and maintain at scale,” while noting that all three formats are equally acceptable to it.

It does not change what is true about your business. It removes the chance of being misread. That is a smaller promise than most agencies make about it, and it is the accurate one.

The three types most service businesses need

Most of the value is in three, and everything beyond them is refinement.

The business itself. LocalBusiness, or a more specific subtype where one fits: MedicalBusiness, Dentist, ProfessionalService, Restaurant. Specific is better, because it inherits the right expectations.

Your services. A Service for each thing you sell, with a price where you publish prices. This is the piece most sites skip, and it is the one that answers what do they do and what does it cost.

Your questions. FAQPage on any page with real questions and real answers. This one now comes with a caveat large enough that it has its own section below, and anybody still selling it to you as a quick route to a Google rich result has not read the documentation this year.

Copy this and change the facts

One business entity with a stable @id, so every other page can point at the same organisation instead of describing it again:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "ProfessionalService",
  "@id": "https://example.com/#org",
  "name": "Example Business",
  "url": "https://example.com/",
  "email": "hello@example.com",
  "telephone": "+1-555-000-0000",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "1 Example Street, Suite 100",
    "addressLocality": "Napa",
    "addressRegion": "CA",
    "postalCode": "94559",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "areaServed": [
    { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Napa Valley" },
    { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "San Francisco Bay Area" }
  ],
  "hasOfferCatalog": {
    "@type": "OfferCatalog",
    "name": "Services",
    "itemListElement": [
      { "@type": "Offer",
        "itemOffered": { "@type": "Service", "name": "Initial consultation" },
        "price": "150", "priceCurrency": "USD" }
    ]
  }
}
</script>

And an FAQ block, which is the fastest win on the list:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [{
    "@type": "Question",
    "name": "Do you take walk-ins?",
    "acceptedAnswer": {
      "@type": "Answer",
      "text": "No. Every visit is booked in advance."
    }
  }]
}
</script>

Change the facts, keep the shape. Then validate it — Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org's validator both take a pasted URL and both are free.

What happened to FAQ rich results

This deserves saying plainly, because it is the clearest example of why markup should never be bought as a trick.

When FAQPage arrived in 2019 it did something visible: your questions could expand directly underneath your listing in Google, taking up real space in the results. That was the pitch, and for a few years it worked.

Google narrowed it in August 2023, restricting the FAQ rich result to well-known, authoritative government and health websites. Every other site kept the markup and lost the display. Then it went entirely. Google’s own documentation now records that the feature “is no longer shown in Google Search results,” and that it stopped appearing on 7 May 2026. The How-to rich result was retired in the same clear-out.

So should you still write it? Yes, and for a reason worth being honest about, because it is a weaker reason than the one it replaces. A rich result was something you could see. What FAQPage does now is label a question as a question and its answer as an answer, in a standard vocabulary, for anything reading the page that is not Google’s results layout. That includes the AI assistants doing the summarising this journal keeps writing about. It is a well-founded expectation rather than a demonstrated result, and you should treat anyone claiming to measure it with suspicion.

The general lesson is bigger than the FAQ. Markup bought for a display format is a bet on somebody else’s product decisions, and those get reversed. Markup written because it accurately describes your page keeps its value regardless of what any one search engine chooses to render this year.

The four mistakes that make it useless

Marking up things the page does not say. Reviews that are not on the page, prices that appear nowhere, hours you do not keep. Google’s structured data guidelines are blunt about it: “Don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page,” and “don’t mark up irrelevant or misleading content, such as fake reviews.”

Be precise about the consequence, because it is routinely overstated in both directions. Google says a structured data issue “can result in a manual action,” and that such an action “means that a page loses eligibility for appearance as a rich result; it doesn’t affect how the page ranks in Google web search.” So it is not the ranking catastrophe some agencies threaten. It is the loss of the exact thing the markup was added to earn.

Describing the business differently on every page. The reason for a single @id is so eight pages describe one organisation rather than eight similar ones.

Letting it drift. Schema written once and never touched becomes a confident, machine-readable statement of facts that stopped being true. That is worse than having none, because it is asserted in the format most likely to be believed.

Treating it as the strategy. Structured data describes what is there. It cannot describe a service page that does not exist.

What to expect

Be plain about the ceiling. Schema does not lift a page’s ranking by itself, it does not guarantee a rich result, and it will not make a thin page competitive. Google’s documentation describes it as what makes a page eligible for enhanced display, which is a careful word and worth borrowing.

What it does is make you unambiguous, and on a page that already answers something honestly, unambiguous is the difference between being summarised correctly and being skipped.

It is table stakes, not a strategy. The strategy is the thing it describes: a site that is legible to people and machines at the same time.

Questions people ask