Schema markup
A caption for machines, written so Google can tell a business from a recipe from a list of questions.
What does Schema markup mean?
A hidden label on a page that tells search engines what the page is about, such as a local business, a service, or a list of questions, using a shared vocabulary.
Also called: structured data, schema.org
Labels, not magic words
Schema is a vocabulary published at schema.org. A page can say, in that vocabulary, that it describes a local business with a name and a service area, or that a block of text is a question and an answer. Visitors do not read the label. Crawlers can.
The label does not outrank a competitor by existing. It reduces guesswork. Google may use it to understand the page, and sometimes to show a richer result. It may also ignore it. Anyone who sells schema as a switch for the map is skipping the part they cannot control.
Wrong labels are a problem
Marking an ordinary service page up as a product for sale, or inventing a star rating the business did not earn in a visible review, is worse than leaving the label off. The visible page and the hidden label should describe the same facts.
A dentist's page can identify the practice and the kind of visit. It should not claim a medical outcome inside schema or in the paragraph. A lawyer's page can name practice areas. It should not mark a guaranteed result. If we cannot point at the fact, we do not encode it.
What an owner should ask
Ask which types will be on the site and why. For most local businesses the useful ones are the business itself, the service area, and maybe a short set of real questions. A breadcrumb trail can be labeled too, so the path home is clear to a crawler.
You can test public pages with Google's Rich Results Test, linked from the website grader instructions. The grader itself does not read schema. It checks the domain, HTTPS, and mail records only.
An example
A dental office's old site had review stars in the search snippet that did not match any reviews on the page. The stars came from leftover schema. Removing the fake rating and labeling the practice as a local business, with the same name as the Google profile, is the repair. The snippet may get simpler. It will at least be true.
Questions we get asked
Will schema make my hours show in Google?
Hours in the map usually come from the Google Business Profile, not from a tag on the website. Keep them matched. Schema on the site is an extra description, not the editor for the profile.
Do I need to learn the code?
No. If we build the site, we add the labels that match the copy. Your job is to correct the facts the labels repeat: name, services, and area.
