Schema.org in brief: how Google understands your page

Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for telling Google, in terms a machine understands, what's on your page: "this is a restaurant, here's the address, these are the hours." The information sits in a small block of code that visitors never see. Google uses it to understand the page and sometimes to show it as a richer result, but it doesn't promise that to anyone.

What Schema.org actually is

Schema.org was started by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex and is now maintained as a community project. It has a long list of types (restaurant, product, event, article, organization) and, for each one, its properties: name, address, phone, hours, the price shown on the page, a date and so on.

Google calls this structured data and accepts three formats: JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa. It recommends JSON-LD when your setup allows it. The practical difference: JSON-LD lives on its own in a script block and doesn't get tangled up with the page text, so you can edit it without breaking the layout.

Which types matter for a small business

For most business websites, two or three types cover everything:

For LocalBusiness, Google requires the name and address and recommends the main phone number, opening hours (openingHoursSpecification), geographic coordinates with at least five decimal places, and the page URL. Restaurants can also add a menu link and the type of cuisine.

Structured data doesn't replace your Google Business Profile; it adds to it. If you're just getting started with local SEO, begin with our first steps for a small business.

What changed in 2023

Plenty of people still say "add FAQ markup to every page to take up more space in Google." That no longer works. In August 2023, Google announced that FAQ rich results would only appear for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. At the same time it limited HowTo rich results to desktop, and in September 2023 it dropped them entirely.

Google says FAQ markup you already have does no harm, so there's no rush to delete it. Just don't add more expecting stars and expandable questions in the results.

The rules you don't break

Google has three rules that matter for any business:

1. The data has to be true to the page. The markup describes what's actually on that page, not what you'd like Google to believe.
2. Don't mark up what visitors can't see. If the hours are in the code, they need to be on the page too. A five-star rating that appears nowhere on the site is exactly what's off-limits.
3. Misleading markup gets penalized. Google can issue a manual action, and the page loses eligibility for rich results.

We add one rule of our own: update the code whenever you update the page. If you change to summer hours and forget the code, Google gets two different versions.

How to check that it works

Google recommends the Rich Results Test. Enter the page URL or paste the code, and you'll see which types it found, which required properties are missing and, for some types, a preview of how the result might look. Run it after every major change to the site.

Don't expect results the next day. Google has to crawl the page again, and even with perfect markup it decides on its own whether to show a rich result.