What schema markup is, and which types a business needs

Schema markup uses a shared vocabulary, published at schema.org, that the major search engines agreed on. A page’s markup names a type, such as Organization, Product or Article, and fills in that type’s properties: a name, an address, a price, a date.

The markup is usually written as JSON-LD, a block of code in the page that visitors never see.

Markup has two effects. The first is understanding: a search engine or an answer engine reading the page is told what it is looking at, in a form it does not have to interpret.

The second is appearance. Some types make a result eligible for a rich result: a product’s price and stock, an article’s date, the trail of pages above a title, a company’s logo beside its name. Eligible does not mean shown. Google decides case by case.

A handful of types cover most business websites.

• Organization, or LocalBusiness for a business with premises: the name, logo, address and contact details, stated once.
• WebSite: the name of the site, which Google uses for the site name in results.
• BreadcrumbList: where the page sits in the site.
• Product: name, price and availability, on each product page.
• Article: headline, date and author, on each article.
• FAQPage: the questions a page answers and the answers it gives.

Markup must describe what a visitor can see on the page. Stating a price, a review or a question that the page does not show breaks Google’s guidelines, and can lose a site its rich results altogether.

Reviews need particular care. Google does not show star ratings for a business that marks up reviews of itself on its own website.

Two free tools read a page’s markup.

• Google’s Rich Results Test shows which rich results a page is eligible for, and any errors in the way.
• The Schema Markup Validator, at validator.schema.org, checks the markup against the vocabulary itself.

Search Console then reports on the markup across the whole site, one report for each type it finds, with the pages that have errors.

Start with Organization and WebSite on the home page, and BreadcrumbList everywhere. Add Product or Article where those pages exist. Then check a competitor’s page in the same two tools: our guide to why a competitor outranks you shows where that comparison fits.