Structured data is a machine-readable description of what is on a page: that this string is a phone number, this is an address, this is a service. It does not raise rankings by itself. What it does is remove ambiguity, which matters more as search results and AI answers are increasingly assembled from what a system is confident it understood.
What it does and does not do
It does not act as a ranking factor. Adding markup to a page that answers nothing well will not move it.
What it does is make facts unambiguous. A page can state a phone number and a machine has to infer that it is one. Marked up, there is no inference. The same applies to opening hours, service areas, prices, and the relationship between pages.
That matters in two places: some types make a page eligible for enhanced search results, and increasingly, systems assembling answers rely on being confident about what a page says. It is worth doing, and it is not a substitute for the page being good.
The types worth having
| Type | What it covers | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| LocalBusiness | Name, address, phone, hours, service area, and the specific trade category | Essential |
| Service | Each service you offer, on its own page | High |
| BreadcrumbList | Where a page sits in the site, and it still produces a visible result | High |
| Organization | The business as an entity, including logo and profiles elsewhere | Useful |
| Article | Blog posts and guides | Useful for content |
| Review and AggregateRating | Ratings, with important restrictions | Careful, see below |
For most local service businesses, the first three do the overwhelming majority of the work. A site with those in place and accurate is ahead of most competitors, who typically have none or have a broken fragment left by a plugin.
The review markup trap
The one worth being careful about.
Marking up reviews about your own business, on your own website, does not produce a star rating in search results. Self-serving review markup is specifically excluded, and businesses regularly add it, see nothing, and conclude structured data does not work.
Review markup is intended for reviews of something else, such as a product or a service you are reviewing rather than reviews of yourself. Ratings that appear beside a local business in results come from the review platform, not from your site. The way to influence those is to accumulate genuine reviews, which is a different exercise entirely.
The rule that governs everything
Markup must match what is visible on the page.
Marking up hours that are not stated, prices that do not appear, or services that are not described is a misrepresentation, and it is one of the few areas where structured data can actively cause a problem rather than simply doing nothing.
The same principle applies to consistency across sources. Your marked-up name, address, and phone should agree exactly with your listing and your directory entries, which is the argument made in keeping your business details consistent.
What not to bother with
- FAQ markup for the search feature, which no longer exists. Keeping existing markup is harmless and adding it for that reason is no longer a reason.
- HowTo markup, deprecated some time ago.
- Deep nesting for its own sake. A correct, simple block outperforms an elaborate one with errors.
- Multiple conflicting blocks, which is what happens when a theme and two plugins each add their own. Common, and worth checking for.
Where it goes and how to check
In the page source as a script block, which is the format everything now prefers and which keeps the markup separate from the visible content so it does not break when the design changes.
Checking is straightforward: the structured data testing tools will parse a page and report what they found and any errors. The check worth running is not only whether it is valid but whether it is accurate, since valid markup describing the wrong hours is worse than none.
Once in place it needs revisiting when anything factual changes: hours, address, phone, service area, or the services offered. That is the maintenance most sites skip, which is how a site ends up confidently declaring hours it stopped keeping two years ago.
Frequently asked questions
Does schema markup improve rankings?
Not directly. It removes ambiguity about what a page contains, which makes some enhanced results possible and helps systems assembling answers be confident about your details. It does not compensate for a weak page.
What schema should a local service business use?
LocalBusiness with accurate name, address, phone, hours and service area, Service markup on each service page, and BreadcrumbList. Those three cover most of the available value.
Will review schema put stars in my search results?
Not for reviews of your own business on your own site, which is specifically excluded. Ratings shown beside a local business come from the review platform rather than from your markup.
Is FAQ schema still worth adding?
Not for the search feature, which has been deprecated. Existing markup is harmless and can stay, and the value now lies in the questions being answered clearly on the page.
Can structured data cause problems?
Yes, if it describes things not present on the page, such as hours or prices that do not appear. Markup must match visible content, and inaccurate markup is worse than none.
How often does schema need updating?
Whenever anything factual changes: hours, address, phone, service area, or services. This is the maintenance most sites skip, which leaves markup confidently stating details that stopped being true.
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.
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