LocalBusiness schema markup: what it can and can't do

LocalBusiness schema markup is a short block of code on your website that states your business details in a format Google reads directly: what kind of business you are, your name, address, phone number, hours and a few other facts. It helps Google understand the page and can make it eligible for some search features. It doesn't guarantee that anything shows up, and Google doesn't describe it as a way to rank higher.

Customers never see it. It sits in the code of the page, behind the text they do see, and it has to match that text.

What it is, in plain words

Google's introduction to structured data describes it as a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying its content. It says structured data gives Google explicit clues about the meaning of a page. LocalBusiness is the type for a business with a physical location, and Google recommends writing it in a format called JSON-LD.

Read out loud, the block for a hardware store says something like this:

• Type: hardware store
• Name: Main Street Hardware
• Phone: +1 815 555 0136
• Address: the street, city, state and ZIP code printed on the sign
• Hours: Monday to Saturday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., closed Sunday
• Website: the full address of the store's page

That's the whole idea. The same facts that are already on your contact page, written once more in a form a machine doesn't have to guess at.

What Google asks for

Google's LocalBusiness documentation lists two required properties: the name of the business and its address. For the address, it asks you to include as many parts as you can. The recommended properties include:

• telephone, meant to be the main way customers contact you, with the country code and area code
• openingHoursSpecification, your hours, including late nights and seasonal closures
• url, the working address of the page for that location
• geo, the latitude and longitude, to at least 5 decimal places
• menu and servesCuisine, for restaurants and other food businesses

Google says to use the most specific type of local business you can. Its examples are Restaurant, DaySpa and HealthClub. The schema.org vocabulary that Google's docs are based on also has types like Plumber, Electrician, RoofingContractor, GeneralContractor, HVACBusiness, AutoRepair and HardwareStore. If you're more than one type, Google says to list them together.

By kind of business

• A restaurant uses the Restaurant type, adds its menu link, its cuisine and its hours. Google's hours examples cover closing past midnight and closing for the winter holidays.
• A shop uses the most specific store type, its street address and its hours. A garden center that closes for the winter can mark the closed season with a start and end date.
• A contractor or plumber with a showroom uses its trade type and the address customers actually visit.
• A service-area business that hid its street address on Google has a choice to make. Google's general guidelines say the markup has to describe what's visible on the page, so don't put an address in the code that you left off the site. List the parts you do show, like your city, state and ZIP code. We cover hiding the address in service-area businesses on Google Maps.

What it can do

• Help Google read the page. The facts are labeled instead of buried in a paragraph or a footer.
• Make the page eligible for search features. Google's LocalBusiness page opens by describing the business details people may see in a knowledge panel, or in a list of businesses when they search for a type of business. It says the markup lets you tell Google about your hours, departments within a business and more.
• Keep your key facts in one tidy place. Name, phone and hours, stated once, matching the page. That's part of keeping your details the same everywhere, which we cover in name, address and phone consistency.

What it can't do

• Guarantee anything. Google's general structured data guidelines say Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if the page is marked up correctly. Google decides what to show based on many things, including the searcher's location and device.
• Put stars from your own reviews in search results. Google's LocalBusiness page says the rating and review properties are only for sites that capture reviews about other local businesses. A plumber's own website isn't that kind of site. Quote your Google reviews on the page as text, link to them on Google, and leave them out of the markup.
• Replace your Business Profile. The markup describes your website. Your profile is still what you manage for Google Maps, and it still needs its own care.
• Fix wrong details somewhere else. If an old directory has your old number, the markup on your site doesn't change it.
• Hide anything. The guidelines say not to mark up content that isn't visible to readers of the page, and not to mark up irrelevant or misleading content such as fake reviews. Breaking these rules can lead to a manual action, and Google says a structured data manual action means the page loses eligibility for rich results.

How to add it and check it

• On a site builder or WordPress. Google's introduction says your content management system may have a search settings page or a plugin for structured data, and names Wix, WordPress and Shopify as examples.
• On a custom site. Your developer adds the block to the page with your business details, usually the home page or the contact page. Google says you can add it to any page, though it may make more sense on a page with information about your business.
• Test it. Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test and fix any critical errors it reports.
• Give it time. Google's LocalBusiness page says it may take several days after publishing a page for Google to find and crawl it.
• Update it with everything else. New hours on the door means new hours on your profile, on the page and in the markup, all on the same day.

LocalBusiness data is one line on our local SEO checklist. It's worth doing right, and it's worth knowing that it's a small part of the whole job.

Check if your site has it

Our free website checker looks for local business data on your page, along with your page title, your search description and Google's own mobile speed test, and explains what it finds in plain English. It takes under a minute.