Schema.org

Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for describing the things a web page is about, a business, a product, an event, a review, a question and its answer, in a form a machine can read. It began as a joint project of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex and is maintained as a community activity; it is written into pages as JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa.

A vocabulary, not a format

Schema.org defines types and their properties: LocalBusiness has an address, a telephone, opening hours and an area served, and dozens of more specific types sit beneath it. It does not say how any of that reaches the page. The encoding does that, and Google accepts all three, recommending JSON-LD because it is a block of data kept apart from the visible markup. The vocabulary decides what can be said; the encoding decides where it sits; the visible text on the page should agree with both.

Describing the business rather than the website

Most markup on small-business sites describes the website. Page builders emit WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, SearchAction and ImageObject by default, so a crawler learns that the page has a title and a search box and nothing about who runs the business. This site’s own audit of 9,483 small-business sites found only 17.8% with no schema.org markup at all; most of the rest carried website types, LocalBusiness appeared on roughly a quarter, and a further 13.7% had business schema missing the fields that would make it usable. The breakdown is in what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler. The type an assistant needs is the one for the business, with the address, phone, hours and area filled in and matching the text on the page.

A common question

Which schema.org type should a local business use?

LocalBusiness, or the most specific type beneath it that fits (Dentist, Plumber, Attorney and RealEstateAgent are all descendants), with name, address, telephone, openingHoursSpecification and areaServed filled in. Organization describes the company as an entity; a page can carry both when they agree on the name and address.

Sources

Vocabulary: schema.org, About and the LocalBusiness type. Formats: Google’s introduction to structured data. The audit figures are this site’s own; sample drawn per metro and trade, percentages describe the sample.