What is schema markup, and which types to use
Schema markup is a small piece of structured code that tells search engines exactly what your content is: a business, a service, a question and answer, an article. It does not change what visitors see. It helps search engines, and increasingly AI assistants, understand and present your pages accurately. This guide covers what it can and cannot do, the few types worth using, and how to check it.
What it can do
- Help search engines connect your business details, such as name, phone, address, and area served, to one clear entity.
- Make a page eligible for enhanced listings, called rich results, for some content types.
- Give search engines and AI systems an unambiguous statement of what a page is about, which can reduce misreadings.
It is not a ranking trick. Markup does not make a weak page rank, and a page without it can rank perfectly well. It makes understanding easier.
The types worth using
You do not need dozens. A handful covers most small-business needs.
- Organization or LocalBusiness: your name, address or service area, phone, hours, and website. This is the one that helps most.
- Service: the services you offer, matched to the pages that describe them.
- BreadcrumbList: reinforces your site structure, and can show a trail under your listing.
- Article or BlogPosting: for blog posts, with a real author and dates.
- FAQPage: for genuine question-and-answer sections on a page.
- Review and AggregateRating: only for genuine reviews, and only where the guidelines allow it.
A well-built site adds these automatically, and ties them together so that the business, its services, and its pages refer to each other.
What Google does and does not reward
This is where older advice has aged badly, so it is worth being precise.
- FAQ rich results. Google now shows FAQ rich results in search only for a small set of well-known authoritative sites. For most businesses, FAQ markup will not produce an expanded listing. It is still valid, and the questions are still worth writing for readers, but do not expect extra space in the results.
- Review stars. Review markup for your own business, written or collected and marked up by you on your own site, is generally not eligible for star ratings. Marking up fake or self-published reviews as if they were independent breaks Google's guidelines and can lead to a manual action.
- Honesty is the rule. Markup must match content that is genuinely visible on the page. Marking up things users cannot see, or that are untrue, is the fastest way to lose the benefit.
Validate it
Markup that is invalid or incomplete is ignored, and you will not always notice. Checking takes minutes.
- Use Google's Rich Results Test on a live URL to see which enhancements it qualifies for.
- Use the Schema Markup Validator for general syntax checking.
- Watch the enhancement reports in Search Console, which flag errors across the whole site.
If a tool reports errors or warnings, fix the markup and test again. Errors are the priority; warnings about optional fields are often fine to leave.
A sensible approach
- Add Organization or LocalBusiness markup site-wide, with accurate details.
- Add Service markup to each service page, and BlogPosting to posts.
- Add FAQPage only where a page genuinely contains those questions and answers.
- Add review markup only for genuine reviews that meet the guidelines, and otherwise leave it out.
- Validate after any change, and re-check after redesigns, which often break markup silently.