Organization Schema

Organization schema is the schema.org markup that describes a company as an entity: its name, logo, address, contact details and the profiles elsewhere on the web that belong to it. It says who publishes the site; LocalBusiness and its subtypes say what the business does and where.

What goes in it

Google lists no required properties for Organization. Its structured data documentation recommends adding whichever apply: name, legalName and alternateName; url and logo; address, telephone, email and contactPoint; description and foundingDate; identifiers such as a VAT or tax number; and sameAs, the list of profile URLs that belong to the same organization. Google reads the block to tell one organization from another with a similar name, to choose the logo it shows, and to fill a knowledge panel. It asks for the markup on the home page or on one about page, not on every page.

Organization or LocalBusiness

In schema.org, LocalBusiness is a subtype of Organization, so a LocalBusiness block is already an Organization block with opening hours and geography added. Google’s guidance is to use the most specific type that fits: a dental practice is a Dentist, a shop that sells online is an OnlineStore, an organization with no premises stays an Organization. The type a page builder emits by default is none of these. In this site’s own audit of 9,483 small-business sites, only 17.8% carried no schema.org markup at all; what the rest carried was mostly WebSite, WebPage and BreadcrumbList, which describe the website rather than the business, and a further 13.7% had business markup with the identifying fields left empty. The breakdown is in what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler.

The sameAs list

An assistant deciding whether the site it fetched belongs to the business a directory names has to match two records. sameAs gives it the match in one step: the site’s Organization block points at the profile URLs the directory already knows. The same audit found 43.1% of sites inconsistent about their own name, address or phone number across three pages. A sameAs list does not repair that, but it lets a machine check the site against a record that is consistent.

A common question

When should a page use LocalBusiness markup instead of Organization schema?

LocalBusiness is a subtype of Organization, so that block is already an Organization block with opening hours and geography added, and the guidance is to pick the most specific type that fits. A dental practice is a Dentist, while an organization with no premises stays an Organization. What a page builder emits by default is neither. In the audit of 9,483 small-business sites, only 17.8% carried no markup at all, and most of what the rest carried was WebSite, WebPage and BreadcrumbList, which describe the website rather than the company behind it.

Sources

Property list and placement: Google’s Organization structured data documentation. Type hierarchy: schema.org/Organization. The audit figures are this site’s own; sample drawn per metro and trade, percentages describe the sample.