seo
Schema for Local SEO: The Key to Optimising Your Business Listings
Published: 05/09/25 - Updated: 05/09/25
Local SEO is the process of optimising your website in order to appear for local ‘near me’ searches or to appear in Google Maps or Google’s map packs within the SERPs. If your business has a physical location(s), it’s vital for you to appear when someone searches for you or your services in your local area. There are a number of different ways in which to help boost your listing performance for local search, but one such way that can have an immediate impact is schema mark up.
What is Schema markup?
Schema markup, often also referred to as structured data, is a way to further enhance your site’s listings by providing additional useful information to Google. This information helps Google get a better understanding of what you do and what services you offer and can help you appear in a number of different SERP features such as:
- People Also Ask
- Local Map Packs
- Review Snippets
- Enhanced rich results
There are lots of different types of schema, and which ones you might want to use will depend on what services/products you offer, but with that in mind, there are a few general options that will help improve your local visibility:
- Organisation – Provides key information about a company or organisation, such as its name, logo, and contact details etc.
- LocalBusiness – Defines a physical business location with details like address, opening hours, and geo-coordinates.
- Service – Describes the services a business offers, including type, provider, and relevant details.
- Product – Highlights product details like name, description, brand, price, and stock availability.
- FAQPage – Marks up frequently asked questions and answers for better visibility in search results.
- Review – Highlights the evaluation or rating of a product, service, or business.
- Event – Highlights details of an event such as name, date, location, and ticket information etc.
Of these, LocalBusiness and Organisation are key to help improve your visibility across Google Maps and local search. Essentially these help link your site to your address and contact details, helping reinforce your relevance to Google.
The Benefits of Schema Markup for Local SEO.
Alongside helping improve visibility, there are a number of other benefits of including schema mark up. And whilst it’s not a direct ranking factor, these areas can indirectly help improve performance:
- Visibility in Google Maps – whilst you can appear in Google Maps normally by setting up and optimising a Google Business Profile, further reinforcing your site and credentials through schema is key
- Rich snippets (as mentioned earlier)
- Higher click-through-rate (CTR) – not only are rich results more eye-catching, provide more detail than standard listings, but they also take up more space on the SERP, pushing other competitors further down the page.
How to implement Schema on your site.
There are two types of schema code that you can add to your site – JSON-LD and microdata. Both do the same thing, but as JSON-LD is the most common, this is usually the preferred method. There a number of different ways for you to create the schema:
- Manually – you can type the code for yourself based on existing templates, imputing data for relevant fields
- Online Schema Generators – use free online schema generators to generate the code for you
- Site plugins – depending on your CMS, you can download and install plugins that will automatically pull site data to autopopulate relevant fields. Plugins like Yoast,
- ChatGPT – with improvements in LLMs you can now ask tools like ChatGPT to generate the schema code for you. It’s worth noting that this isn’t fool proof and AI does still make mistakes so please check any output first before uploading.
Validating and testing your Schema
With all approaches it’s vital to check and validate any schema markup before you upload it. There are lots of free online tools such as Schema Validator or Google’s Rich Results tester to troubleshoot and identify any warnings or errors within your code before you go to upload it.
And finally, before you get started on your schema journey, there are a few important things to note:
- If there are errors in your code, it’s unlikely there will be any negative impact, but you won’t get the same benefit compared to it being set up correctly.
- Make sure that data on your site matches and is consistent with other data (Google Business Profile, local directories etc). Conflicting information will make Google question the accuracy of your data and this will likely impact your visibility as a result.
- As part of this, make sure to update your schema if any details change on your site. Some CMSs will do this automatically, but it’s not guaranteed so pay close attention.
- Try to avoid using any irrelevant schema. It might seem like a great idea to add all different types of schema to your page that you can, but this can sometimes be superfluous and can come at the detriment to performance – stick to the most relevant ones that make sense for your business.
Schema markup isn’t something to sleep on if you have a local business. By implementing different types of schema you can drastically improve the appearance of search results, improve your visibility within Google Maps, and ultimately help drive more traffic to your site and your physical locations.
Ed Coles
Ed is the SEO Lead at Kaizen, with 8 years experience in the SEO industry. Having worked across various agencies from small to large multinational independents, Ed initially started in the world of PPC before quickly moving to the world of SEO. From helping clients in the third sector and retail, to working on larger global ecommerce sites, Ed has been responsible for supporting the roll out and delivery of global SEO strategies in EMEA and NORA across some iconic brands such as Vans, Timberland, The North Face, LEGO, and Adidas, among many others.