Structured data for a local business: what to add
Structured data is a block of labelled facts in a page’s code that tells search engines and AI assistants who the business is. A local business should mark up five things: the business itself, each service, its prices where they are public, the questions it answers, and the page’s place in the site. Every fact in it must match what the page shows and what your Business Profile says.
By Gavin Levine, Founder and Principal Consultant
The five things to mark up
- The business: name, address or area served, phone, hours, website and links to its profiles
- Each service: what it is, who provides it and where
- Prices, where you publish them, so an assistant asked "what does it cost" can quote a real number
- Questions and answers that appear on the page
- Breadcrumbs, which show where a page sits in the site
Why it matters for AI answers
An assistant asked to recommend a business has to be sure which business a page describes. Text can be read several ways. Labelled facts cannot. A home page with no structured data naming the business leaves the engine to guess the name, the location and the hours from the layout.
What to leave out
Do not mark up anything the page does not show. Do not add review ratings unless they are real reviews a visitor can read. Search engines treat structured data that disagrees with the visible page as spam, and an assistant that finds two versions of a fact trusts neither.
Some markup no longer earns a special display in Google results, FAQ markup among them. It is still read as plain information, which is the reason to keep it.
Keep one set of facts
The name, address and phone number should be identical in your structured data, on the page, in your Google Business Profile and in every directory. Small differences, such as "Suite 4" in one place and "#4" in another, are enough for a system to treat one business as two.
Questions people ask
Does structured data guarantee a rich result in Google?
No. It makes a page eligible for the displays Google still supports, and Google decides whether to show them.
What format should structured data use?
JSON-LD, placed in the page’s HTML. It is the format Google recommends and the easiest to keep in step with the page.
Can I add structured data if my website platform controls the template?
Often yes, through a header-code or tag manager setting. Where the platform does not allow it, the fix is a request to the platform.
See what AI crawlers find on your site
The scan checks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google can get into your site, read it and tell who you are. You keep the results either way.