Rich Results You Could Be Eligible For

Eligibility is the question, not implementation

Most advice about structured data explains how to add it, which is now largely automatic in any modern platform.

The harder question is which types your business is eligible for at all, since there are dozens and most describe things you do not have.

Recipes, courses, job postings, software applications, and datasets are all types, and none of them applies to a plumber.

So the useful exercise is working out your four and ignoring the rest.

The ones that usually apply

• Business information: name, address, hours.
• Breadcrumbs, which change how the address displays.
• Questions and answers on a page.
• Products, if you sell them online.
• Events, if you run any.

The first two are worth having on every site and neither produces anything dramatic. The third is the one with a visible effect, since a page marked up this way can have its questions shown expanded underneath the result.

Review stars are the exception people ask about

Since they are the most visible and the most misunderstood.

Stars appearing beside a result come from reviews, and a business cannot generate them by marking up reviews it collected and published on its own site.

Self-serving review markup, where a business rates itself on its own pages, is disregarded for local businesses specifically.

So a supplier promising star ratings in your search results by adding markup to your testimonials page is describing something that will not happen.

Stars for a local business come through the listing and the reviews on it, which is a different route entirely.

Product reviews on a shop are a separate case and can produce stars legitimately.

Check what you already have

Before adding anything, since most platforms output some of this automatically.

Run three of your pages through the rich results testing tool, which reports what was detected and whether it is valid.

Frequently a site already has business information and breadcrumbs from its theme, correctly, and nobody knew.

It also reveals errors, such as an address that no longer matches or hours that were never updated.

That check takes five minutes and it is the whole of the diagnosis.

Do it before commissioning any work in this area, since the answer frequently removes the need for it entirely.

A worked example

A business was quoted for a structured data implementation covering nine types.

Testing their pages showed the theme was already producing business information and breadcrumbs correctly.

Of the remaining seven proposed types, five did not apply to their business at all, one was the review markup that would be disregarded, and one was questions, which they did not have on any page.

They added question markup to three pages that already had questions on them, which was a plugin setting.

Those three pages began showing expanded questions in results within a few weeks.

The quoted work would have produced nothing beyond that.

It has to describe what is on the page

The rule that keeps this safe.

Markup describing questions that are not visible on the page, prices that are not shown, or reviews that do not exist is against the guidelines.

The penalty is usually that the feature stops being shown for your site, which is a quiet loss rather than a dramatic one.

So mark up what is genuinely there, and where you want the feature, put the content on the page first.

That is also the correct order for the reader, which is the usual pattern in this subject.

Keep it accurate as things change

Since this is data and data goes stale.

Hours, address, telephone number, and prices all appear in markup and all change.

A site with markup saying you close at five when you now close at six is publishing wrong information in a form that machines read preferentially.

Add it to whatever you check when details change, alongside the listing and the footer.

Retest one page after any theme or platform change, since these are generated and can silently stop.

What it does not do

Worth stating plainly, since it is oversold.

Structured data is not a ranking factor in itself and adding it does not move a page up.

What it can do is change how a result looks, which affects how many people click it, which is a real but smaller effect.

A page that ranks eleventh with beautiful markup is still on the second page.

So it belongs after the content and the basics rather than instead of them.

Only mark up questions you would keep anyway

A caution about the one type with a visible effect, since it invites a particular mistake.

Pages get questions bolted onto the bottom purely to qualify for the feature, which produces a section of invented questions nobody asked.

Those read as filler to anybody who reaches them and they add length to a page that did not need it.

Use the questions customers actually ask, which you already have from your enquiries and calls, and put them where they help the reader.

If the questions would not earn their place without the markup, the page does not need either.

The counter-case

For some businesses this matters a great deal.

A shop selling products online gains real visibility from price and availability appearing in results, and that is worth implementing properly.

Anybody running events or publishing recipes has types that produce prominent placements.

And as more results are assembled rather than listed, being machine-readable about who you are is likely to matter more rather than less.

Test what you already have, add question markup where you have questions, and ignore the types that do not describe your business.

The five minutes

1. Test three pages in the rich results tool.
2. Note what already exists.
3. Fix anything inaccurate.
4. Add questions where pages have them.
5. Ignore types that do not apply.
6. Do not expect stars from your own reviews.
7. Retest after any rebuild.

Step one settles most of this, since a large share of sites already output the types that matter and the work being quoted for has already been done by the theme.

How it gets added is covered in structured data without a developer.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.