LocalBusiness Schema
LocalBusiness schema is the schema.org type for a business with a physical location, and the structured data that describes that business, its address, phone, hours and price range, to a machine reading the page. The type is a subtype of both Organization and Place.
What the type carries
schema.org defines LocalBusiness as a subtype of Organization and Place, inheriting everything both carry and adding four properties of its own: openingHours, priceRange, currenciesAccepted and floorLevel. Beneath it sit around thirty more specific types, Restaurant, Store and MedicalBusiness among them. Google’s structured data documentation requires only name and address, recommends telephone, url, geo, openingHoursSpecification and priceRange, and asks for the most specific subtype that fits. The markup is usually written as JSON-LD in the page head, and its job is to state the identity once, in a form no parser has to guess at.
Markup about the business, and markup about the website
Most small-business sites already carry schema. This site’s own audit of 9,483 of them found only 17.8% with no schema.org markup at all. What the rest carried was mostly WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, SearchAction and ImageObject: the page builder’s description of the website, saying nothing about who runs it or where. LocalBusiness or a subtype appeared on roughly a quarter of sites, and a further 13.7% had business schema missing the fields that would make it usable. The audit is written up in what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler. Presence of markup is the wrong test; the question is whether the markup names a business.
A common question
Which LocalBusiness subtype should a business use?
The most specific one that fits, which is what Google’s documentation asks for. A subtype inherits every property of LocalBusiness, so nothing is lost by choosing Dentist or Plumber over the parent, and the machine learns the trade from the type alone. When no subtype describes the business, LocalBusiness itself is correct.
Related terms
Sources
Type definition: schema.org LocalBusiness. Required and recommended properties: Google’s local business structured data documentation. The audit figures are this site’s own; detection covered JSON-LD and microdata; sample drawn per metro and trade.