Schema markup for local businesses
Structured data hands AI clean facts about your business. A practical, copy-paste guide to LocalBusiness schema.
What schema markup actually is
Schema markup is a small block of structured data — usually JSON-LD — that you add to your site to state your facts in a format machines read perfectly. Instead of leaving an engine to guess your hours from a paragraph, you declare them: name, address, phone, hours, price range, the services you offer, your geographic area. It's the difference between describing yourself in prose and filling out a form the machine already knows how to read.
For AI answer engines, that clarity is gold. A model trusts a fact more when it's stated unambiguously and corroborated elsewhere. Schema is the cleanest way to state it.
Start with LocalBusiness (or a more specific type)
The base type for most physical or service-area businesses is LocalBusiness, but schema.org offers more specific subtypes — Restaurant, Dentist, Plumber, HairSalon, LawFirm and many more. Use the most specific one that fits; it tells the engine more about what you do. The essential properties to fill in are name, address (as a structured PostalAddress), telephone, url, openingHours, priceRange, and the areaServed.
Add an aggregateRating only if you display real review data on the page, and only if it's genuine — fabricated ratings are a fast way to lose trust and can trigger penalties. The goal of schema is to make true facts legible, never to invent flattering ones.
A copy-paste starting point
Place a script of type "application/ld+json" in your page's HTML containing a JSON-LD object with "@context" set to "https://schema.org" and "@type" set to your business type. Inside it, set name, telephone and url; nest an "address" object of type PostalAddress with streetAddress, addressLocality, addressRegion and postalCode; add an "openingHoursSpecification" for your hours; and list your offerings under "makesOffer" or "hasOfferCatalog".
If hand-writing JSON feels fragile, a generator gets you a valid block in minutes — but always paste the result into Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator before shipping. A single misplaced comma can invalidate the whole block, and an invalid block is worse than none.
Keep it true and keep it current
Schema only helps if it matches reality and agrees with your other listings. If your hours change, update the markup, your Google Business Profile, and your website together — conflicting facts make a model distrust all of them and may drop you from the answer entirely.
Done right, schema is a quiet multiplier: it doesn't change what you offer, it just makes every engine — search and AI alike — certain about it. For a local business, it's one of the highest-confidence GEO moves available.
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