Structured Data for a Local Business

Your address, written for a machine

A person reading your contact page sees a name, an address, a phone number and some opening hours, and understands them at once.

A search engine has to work that out from the page's text, its layout and whatever else it knows about you. Usually it gets it right. Sometimes it does not.

Structured data removes the guessing. It is a short block of code that states the same facts in a fixed vocabulary the main search engines agree on.

Visitors never see it. It sits in the page alongside the visible content and says what that content means.

What the markup can say

• The type of business, as specifically as the vocabulary allows.
• The name, exactly as it appears on signs and the listing.
• The address, broken into street, city, province and postal code.
• The phone number, including the area code.
• Opening hours, day by day.
• The location as map coordinates.
• The website and social profiles that belong to the business.

The first is the one people skip. The vocabulary, from a shared project called Schema.org, has types such as Plumber, Electrician, Florist and Restaurant, and a specific type says more than a general one.

What it looks like

The format Google recommends is called JSON-LD: a block of plain text in the page code, listing each fact beside a label, such as telephone followed by the number.

Older sites sometimes use a different format, with labels woven into the visible HTML. Both work, but a single block is easier to keep right.

Either way, the markup must describe what is on the page. Facts that appear only in the code, such as hours the page never shows, go against Google's guidelines.

Matching it to the listing

The markup, the contact page and your Google My Business listing should agree exactly: the same name, the same address, the same phone number.

Small differences add doubt. A suite number in one place and not another, an old phone number, or the name with a city tacked on can make it unclear whether all three describe one business.

Hours matter most, because they change. Whenever they do, the listing, the page and the markup all need the new hours on the same day.

A worked example

An optometry practice in Port Coquitlam moved two blocks last spring. The listing and the contact page were updated within a week.

This spring, the practice ran its home page through Google's testing tool for the first time and found two descriptions of itself.

One, built into the theme years earlier, still gave the old address. The other, added by a plugin, had the new address but no hours and only a general business type.

The theme's markup was removed, and the plugin's was completed with the hours, the phone number and the vocabulary's Optician type.

The page now describes one practice, at one address, in terms that match its listing.

Testing it

Google's Structured Data Testing Tool shows what a page's markup says. Paste in the page address, or the code itself before it goes live.

It lists each item it finds, with errors that stop the markup being used and warnings about missing details that would help.

Test the home page, the contact page and one of each kind of page template, since markup is usually added by the template rather than page by page.

Search Console also reports structured data errors it finds across the site, which catches problems on pages nobody thought to test.

When plugins and themes disagree

Markup often arrives from several places at once: the theme, a search plugin, a reviews plugin, and code pasted in by a previous web company.

Each may describe the business differently, and nothing warns you, because none of it shows on the page.

Disagreement is common after a redesign, when the new theme brings its own markup and nobody removes the plugin that did the job before.

The testing tool is the only easy way to see them all together. Keep one source for the business details, and switch the others off.

Several locations, or none

A business with several locations should give each one its own page and its own markup: its address, its phone number and its hours.

The home page can then describe the business as a whole, with its logo, main phone number and social profiles.

A business that works at customers' homes and hides its address on the listing should not publish the address in markup either. Mark up what the page shows.

What it will not do

Structured data helps search engines read a page. It does not promise any change in how the page appears or where it ranks.

Nor is it a response to the broad core updates Google confirmed in March and April, for which Google has said there is no specific fix.

It is not a place for keywords either. Markup listing services or towns the page never mentions is the kind Google treats as spam.

What it does is remove one source of confusion, cheaply and for good, as long as it is kept current.

Who should add it

Markup is a small job for whoever maintains the site, and it belongs in the template or a single trusted plugin, not pasted by hand into one page.

Hand-pasted code is how stale markup is born. Nobody remembers it is there, so nobody updates it when the hours or the phone number change.

Ask your web company to set it up once, test it, and note where it lives.

The counter-case

For a single-location business whose listing is correct and whose contact page shows its details plainly, search engines usually understand the basics already.

Markup there is a tidy-up rather than a repair, worth doing at the next round of updates rather than this week.

It matters more where there is something to untangle: a move, a change of name, several locations, or old markup nobody knew was there.

In every case, the markup should say exactly what the page and the listing say.

The order to do it in

1. Run your home page through the testing tool.
2. Note every business description it finds.
3. Remove old or duplicate markup first.
4. Choose the most specific type for the business.
5. Match every detail to the listing.
6. Test again until the errors are gone.
7. Update all three whenever the hours change.

Step three usually matters more than anything added, because a page that describes the business twice, differently, recreates the confusion the markup was meant to remove.

Why a broad update calls for patience rather than quick fixes is covered in a second core update in six weeks.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.