Implementing schema (or structured data) to your website as part of a wider SEO strategy is essential for bringing your site to best practice and gaining valuable rich results.
If you own a local business and have ever investigated how to rank better in your local area, you have probably come across the concept of LocalBusiness schema. But to reap the benefits, your schema needs to be correctly implemented.
You don’t need to implement LocalBusiness schema on every page of your website. Doing so is irrelevant but will likely not hurt your site. Aim to implement LocalBusiness schema on relevant pages like your homepage and locations pages, and other relevant types of schema across your site. To understand more about this, jump to the relevant section below.
In this blog, we look at what local schema is and talk you through best practices for creating and implementing it on your website.
LocalBusiness schema is a type of structured data that can be added to your website to classify information on your pages and help search engines better understand your business. This type of schema should be used for businesses or local branches of businesses with a physical presence in a particular location.
It is a sub-type of Organisation and Place schema. As such, it inherits properties from both. There are many sub-types of LocalBusiness schema, including FoodEstablishment, ProfessionalService, and RealEstateAgent. When choosing your schema, you should always opt for the most specific relevant type available.
Yes, LocalBusiness schema is important to your SEO strategy if you are a local business or an organisation with local branches. Implementing LocalBusiness and other relevant types of schema will help search engines understand the content of your pages and make your website eligible for rich results.
In the case of local businesses, the relevant rich results include a knowledge panel for your business, appearing in business carousels for local searches, and appearing in the local map pack (top three map results).
While schema alone will not have an impact on your rankings, well-implemented structured data is an essential part of any successful search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. It will not only help search engines understand your content but also improve the appearance of your website in search results as you climb in rankings.
Now that we have covered the importance of LocalBusiness Schema for SEO, let’s review how to implement it.
Before you begin creating your schema, you’ll need to identify the most appropriate type for your business. You can use the official Schema.org hierarchy to find the most relevant type of schema under ‘Organisation’.
If none of the sub-types apply, stick with the more general LocalBusiness schema type. To provide further detail, you can use the additionalType property to link to a Wikipedia or Wikidata entry that defines your business type.
Include the required properties and cover as many of the recommended properties as possible.
Google requires the following properties. If these properties are missing, your schema will return an error when validating and your page won’t be eligible for related rich results.
There is an extensive list of properties that we could include in LocalBusiness schema, you can find them all in the official Schema.org documentation. However, there are a few in particular that are recommended by Google and may contribute to better rich results and search experience for your users.
There are several ways to create your structured data. Tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper and Merkel’s Schema Markup Generator are good starting points for basic LocalBusiness schema, but you will be limited to the properties that the tools include. Any extra information will need to be added to your code manually.
On most CMS platforms you’ll also find plugins and tools like Yoast, that automatically create some forms of structured markup.
However you choose to create your schema, be sure to include all of the relevant information and always validate your code before deploying it on your pages.
Use the Schema.org markup validator and Google’s Rich Results Test Tool to validate your code before implementing it. Both tools will flag errors within your code, and the Rich Results Test tool will indicate whether your page is eligible for certain types of rich results. It will also flag up any parts of your schema that do not follow Google’s guidance for implementation.
Once you have your schema ready to implement, you can do so by adding it directly to your HTML code, using a schema app, plugin, or Google Tag Manager to deploy the code. But where on your site should you implement LocalBusiness schema?
You should always implement schema only on the pages where the respective type is relevant. The content in your schema should also be reflected on the page – for example, your address and contact details should be in your footer. Generally, your LocalBusiness schema will be implemented on the homepage, but it can be implemented on any page of your site without creating an issue.
If your business has more than one location (and these are mentioned on your homepage) you’ll want to use the subOrganization or department properties in your homepage markup, and create nested LocalBusiness markup for each location. subOrganization is a more general property, and it may be used to define ‘relationship between two organizations where the first includes the second’. The department property is more granular, and it can be used to specify a unit within the organisation with a specific function, like the Marketing department within a University.
If each location has a dedicated page on your website, create specific LocalBusiness data for each location page and use the parentOrganization or branchOf properties to connect back to the main LocalBusiness data item.
LocalBusiness or Organisation schema may also be relevant to your About Us and Contact Us pages, where your business details appear. On these pages you can also create and implement AboutPage and ContactPage data items, creating the necessary connections between these and your business schema.
You do not need to add LocalBusiness schema to every page of your website. In fact, there are likely other types of schema that are relevant to your pages, like service, product, or article schema. And each of these schema items can be linked to your organisation schema through relevant properties.
While adding LocalBusiness schema to every page of your website is likely irrelevant, it is also not going to harm your performance. However, you should also focus on identifying and implementing the most relevant type of schema to each of your pages and ensuring that your data items are connected to each other and do not conflict. You can use the Schema App paths tool to find opportunities for nesting and connecting your schema.
Here at Wildcat, we understand the importance of structured data for organic performance. Our team reviews and implements relevant schema as part of each SEO campaign. Get in touch to arrange a free consultation if you would like support from the specialists.
