Schema markup for local businesses: the five types that matter

Your website is written for people. Schema markup is a second, invisible version of the important facts, written for machines. It sits in the page code and says, in a standard format every major search engine and AI system understands, "this is a business, this is what it does, these are the towns it serves."

Without it, a machine has to guess from your wording. With it, you are stating the facts directly. For a local business trying to get named in AI answers, that difference matters.

The five that matter

1. LocalBusiness, with a service area. The foundation. Your name, phone, address or home town, hours, and, the part most sites leave out, the list of towns you serve. Many sites have a generic "Organization" or "WebSite" type and nothing that says where they work. If you use one type, use this one, and use the most specific version for your trade where it exists.

2. Service. One entry per service you sell, connected to the business. It turns "we do a lot of things" into a clear catalog a machine can match against a question.

3. FAQPage. The questions people actually ask, with short direct answers. These are some of the most quotable content on any site, because they are already written as answers.

4. Review and AggregateRating. Your real reviews, with who wrote them and when. A note on this one: Google does not show review stars for businesses marking up their own reviews, so do not expect stars in results. The value is that AI models can read who said what, where and when.

5. Article, for case studies. Each project write-up marked as an article, with the photos and the town. It is how your proof becomes something a model can cite.

Schema doesn’t make claims for you. It makes your real facts impossible to misread.

The mistakes that make markup useless

• Markup that disagrees with the page. Schema listing towns or services the visible page never mentions. Machines notice, and trust drops.
• Invented reviews or ratings. Against every platform’s rules, and the fastest way to lose trust you cannot easily win back.
• Only the page builder’s default. Many website builders add a basic WebPage and Breadcrumb block and nothing else. It validates, and it says almost nothing about your business.
• Set once, never updated. New services, new towns and new reviews that never make it into the markup.
• Different details on every page. One phone number here, another there. Use one consistent identity everywhere.

How to check yours

Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator will both show you what markup a page has. Paste in your homepage and a service page. If all you see is WebPage and BreadcrumbList, you have the default and nothing that describes your business.

Or run the free audit below. It reads your schema the way a model does and tells you what is missing.