What is Local Business Schema? How Do I Use It?

Kiley Peters

Small Business,
SEO,
Local SEO

What is Local Business Schema? How Do I Use It?

Local business schema is a type of structured data markup code you can add to your business's website to make it easier for search engines to identify what type of organization you are and what you do. This is a helpful way to help optimize your website for local SEO, as it's a major ranking factor. There are all kinds of properties you can fill out for your local business schema, but let's focus on the main ones to help simplify things a bit.

The main content areas you want to focus on include:

  • @type (Local Business works if your specific line of business is not represented, but ideally you'll be as specific as you can be)
  • image (banner type of image)
  • telephone
  • name (of company)
  • logo (company logo)
  • description (of your company and your offerings)
  • openingHours (your hours of operations)
  • url
  • sameAs (this is a great place to list out the other social properties that support your business)
  • geo (your longitude and latitude coordinates)
  • contactPoint (you'll enter the contact information for your point of contact)
  • address (you'll enter your physical address of your location)

Here is a bit more of a thorough breakdown of the above from Google:

Properties
@id URL, required

Globally unique ID of the specific business location in the form of a URL. The ID should be stable and unchanging over time. Google Search treats the URL as an opaque string and it does not have to be a working link. If the business has multiple locations, make sure the @id is unique for each location.

name Text, required

Business name.

address PostalAddress, required

Address of the specific business location.

address.streetAddress Text, required

Street number, street name, and unit number (if applicable).

address.addressLocality Text, required

City.

address.addressRegion Text, required where applicable

State or province.

address.postalCode Text, required

Postal or zip code.

address.addressCountry Text, required

The 2-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code.

url URL, recommended

The fully-qualified URL of the specific business location. Unlike the @id property, this URL property should be a working link.

geo GeoCoordinates, recommended

Geographic coordinates of the business.

geo.latitude Number, recommended

The latitude of the business location. The precision should be at least 5 decimal places.

geo.longitude Number, recommended

The longitude of the business location. The precision should be at least 5 decimal places.

telephone Text, recommended

A business phone number meant to be the primary contact method for customers. Be sure to include the country code and area code in the phone number.

potentialAction ReserveAction or OrderAction, recommended

Read more about specifying business actions.

openingHoursSpecification OpeningHoursSpecification, recommended

Hours during which the business location is open.

openingHoursSpecification.opens Time, recommended

The time the business location opens, in hh:mm:ss format.

openingHoursSpecification.closes Time, recommended

The time the business location closes, in hh:mm:ss format.

openingHoursSpecification.dayOfWeek Text, recommended

One or more of the following:

  • Monday
  • Tuesday
  • Wednesday
  • Thursday
  • Friday
  • Saturday
  • Sunday
openingHoursSpecification.validFrom Date, recommended

The start date of a seasonal business closure, in YYYY-MM-DD format.

openingHoursSpecification.validThrough Date, recommended

The end date of a seasonal business closure, in YYYY-MM-DD format.

menu URL, recommended

For food establishments, the fully-qualified URL of the menu.

acceptsReservations Boolean, recommended

For food establishments, True or False. If True, the best practice is to also define potentialAction.

department LocalBusiness, recommended

A nested item for a single sub-department you can define using any of the properties in this table.

If you don't want to have to manually write a ton of code, the Schema App is a great tool. You do have to pay for it after the 14-day free trial, but it's worth it. When all is said and done, you can test your local business schema via the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure everything is showing up properly!

Don't forget to round out your digital properties with a solid content marketing strategy as well. And here are a few other ways you might want to invest in brick and mortar digital strategies!

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Kiley
Founder & CEO

Kiley Peters is the Founder and CEO of Brainchild Studios, a boutique audience research, content strategy, and website creation agency primarily serving brands targeting Millennial Moms or business owners. She is also the Founder of the Work From Home Playbook, a series of online courses guiding aspiring entrepreneurial moms through the steps of starting a virtual business. She also launched the Brainchild Fund, a nonprofit initiative to support women and girls in business and entrepreneurship Follow her on Instagram.

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