Schema and structured data
Structured data is the difference between a page a machine has to interpret and a page that states plainly what it is. It is the least visible SEO work and one of the highest-leverage.
The short answer
Schema markup is a block of machine-readable data added to each page, stating what the page is: a local business with these hours and this address, a service offered in these areas, an article by this author, a set of questions and answers. It powers rich results in search, and it is one of the clearest signals an AI assistant has when deciding what your business does.
What we implement
- LocalBusiness with address, phone, hours, service areas and price range
- Service markup on each service page, tied back to the business
- BreadcrumbList so search results show your site structure rather than a bare URL
- FAQPage on pages with genuine question and answer content
- Article or BlogPosting with author, publish date and last-modified date
- Person markup for the people whose expertise the content rests on
- Product or Offer where relevant, with honest pricing
- Review and AggregateRating only where genuine published reviews exist
How schema goes wrong
- Markup added by a plugin that describes a generic organisation, not your business
- Details in the schema that contradict what the page actually says
- Review markup invented or self-supplied, which earns a manual penalty
- Fragments that fail validation and therefore do nothing at all
- Schema on the home page only, so no individual page is described
- Never updated, so the hours in the markup are two years out of date
Worth knowing
Invalid schema is not neutral — it is worse than none, because it burns the crawl and can suppress the rich result the page would otherwise have earned. Every implementation should be validated against Google’s Rich Results Test after it ships and re-checked whenever the site changes, which is the step almost everyone skips.
How we implement it
01
Map the site
Which page type is which. A service page, an article and a location page each need different markup, and treating them the same is the usual mistake.
02
Write it
Hand-written JSON-LD tied to what the page actually says, rather than generated from a plugin with defaults.
03
Validate
Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator, every page type, before and after launch.
04
Maintain
Re-checked when the site changes and when hours, services or areas change. Stale markup is a liability.
Questions about structured data
Does schema improve rankings directly?
Not as a direct ranking factor, no. What it does is make you eligible for rich results, help search engines understand entities and relationships, and give AI assistants a clean statement of what you are. The effect is real, it is just indirect.
Can a plugin do this?
A plugin gets you generic markup, which is better than nothing and worse than accurate. The gap shows on service and location pages, where the useful detail — areas served, what the service actually is — is exactly what a plugin cannot know.
Can we add review stars to our search results?
Only with genuine published reviews, marked up correctly. Self-serving or invented rating markup is one of the more reliable ways to earn a manual penalty, and we will not implement it.
How do we know it is working?
The Rich Results Test tells you it is valid; Search Console’s enhancement reports tell you Google has processed it and flags errors as they appear. Both should be checked, not assumed.
Related: AEO · AI assistant visibility · technical SEO
Not sure what markup your site has? The audit lists it page by page.
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