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Glossary

LocalBusiness schema

LocalBusiness schema is structured data that uses the schema.org LocalBusiness type to state a business's name, address, phone number and opening hours in a standard form that search engines and AI tools can read.

Also called LocalBusiness markup, local business structured data.

By NightshiftDirect Research. Published . Updated .

What structured data is

Google describes structured data as a standardized format for giving information about a page and classifying what is on it (Google Search Central). Your footer might show your address in small grey type. Structured data states the same address in code that visitors never see, labeled as the street address of a business, so a machine does not have to guess what that line of text is.

Do you need it? Your site works without it. We would add it to any local business site anyway, because Google says it uses structured data to understand pages (Google Search Central). The free scan looks for it on your homepage written as JSON-LD, a block of code in the page itself (A2).

The LocalBusiness type

Schema.org, the vocabulary these descriptions are written in, defines LocalBusiness as a particular physical business or branch of an organization, and gives a restaurant, a bank branch and a medical practice among its examples (Schema.org).

LocalBusiness sits under both Organization and Place in that vocabulary. That is why a single block can carry properties from both, such as address, telephone and opening hours.

What Google requires and recommends

Google's documentation for local business markup marks two properties as required: name and address. It lists telephone, url, geo (the map coordinates) and opening hours among the recommended ones (Google Search Central).

Fill in every recommended field that is true for your business, and leave out any you would have to invent. Keep the hours in step with your Business Profile, holiday changes included.

It has to agree with the page

Structured data describes the page it sits on, so it should say what the page says. If the code gives one street address and your footer shows another, search engines are left with two versions of your business. With no address on the page, nothing backs up the code. The scan checks that the street address in your structured data also appears in the text of your homepage (L2), and a separate check flags more than one phone number across your tap-to-call links and structured data (L1).

How the scan checks the markup

Two checks look at the markup itself. The first asks whether your homepage has any structured data at all (A2). The second looks for a business entity, Organization or LocalBusiness, with a name, contact details and sameAs links (A3).

sameAs is the field that lists your profiles on other sites, such as your Google Business Profile and your social pages. It tells anything reading the markup that your site and those profiles describe one business.

What the free scan checks

Questions

Which schema type should my business use?

LocalBusiness, or a more specific type under it when one names what you do. The scan accepts either. Whichever you pick, the name, address and phone in it should match your page and your Business Profile, word for word where you can.

Will adding LocalBusiness schema get me a rich result in Google?

Not by itself. Google says structured data can make a page eligible for rich results, which leaves the choice of what to show with Google (Google Search Central). Add it for what it tells search engines and AI tools about you, and treat any rich result as a bonus.

Where this fits in our work

We handle this as part of AI search (GEO): Site work that helps ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI features read your site, understand who you are and cite you.

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