Structured data is one of the few underused levers left in small-business SEO. It will not push you up the rankings on its own. What it does is change the shape of your result once you are there: stars, prices, FAQs, opening hours. A result that takes up more space and answers more questions gets clicked more often.
The five that earn their keep
- 1LocalBusiness: your address, phone, opening hours and service area. The foundation for any business with a physical presence or a defined service region.
- 2Organization: the entity itself: name, logo, and the sameAs links that connect your site to your social and Maps profiles. This is how search engines learn you are one organisation across the web.
- 3BreadcrumbList, which turns the ugly URL under your result into a readable path. Cheap to add, immediately visible.
- 4FAQPage, for pages where you really do answer questions on the page. Can expand your result with collapsible answers and take over far more screen space.
- 5Article, for blog content: author, publish date, headline and image. Feeds Top Stories and Discover eligibility.
Use JSON-LD, not microdata
Google explicitly prefers JSON-LD, and it is easier to live with, since it is one script block in the head rather than attributes woven through your markup, which means it cannot be accidentally destroyed the next time somebody edits a template.
The rules that keep you out of trouble
- Only mark up what a visitor can see on the page. Marking up invisible content is a manual-action risk, not a clever shortcut.
- Use one connected graph with @id references rather than a dozen disconnected blocks.
- Keep NAP, meaning name, address and phone, byte-identical to your Google Business Profile and directory listings.
- Validate with the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator, then watch the Enhancements reports in Search Console for the following weeks.
What to expect
Rich results are granted, not guaranteed. Valid markup makes you eligible, nothing more. But eligibility costs an afternoon, and the click-through improvement on an existing ranking is the cheapest traffic gain available to most small sites.
