Schema Markup That Actually Matters (and What to Skip)

Organization or LocalBusiness first

This is the foundation of your entity. Name, URL, logo, address, phone, opening hours, geo coordinates, and `sameAs` links to every profile you control. Consistency between this and your Google Business Profile, your website footer and your directory listings is what lets machines resolve you to one unambiguous business.

Service markup on every service page

It states plainly what you sell, who provides it and where. Cheap to add, and it directly supports the entity relationships AI assistants use when deciding whether you're relevant to a query.

FAQPage where you have real questions

Rich results for FAQ have been substantially reduced in Google, which led a lot of people to drop the markup. That was a mistake — it still helps machines parse question-and-answer relationships, which is exactly what matters for AI citation.

BreadcrumbList on every page

It appears in search results, and more usefully it declares your site hierarchy explicitly rather than making a crawler infer it from your URLs and internal links.

Article and Person together

On blog content, `BlogPosting` with a real `author` pointing at a `Person` who has their own page and credentials. This is the structured half of E-E-A-T, and it's how you connect published expertise to a named human.

Skip self-declared ratings

Adding `AggregateRating` to your own Organization schema based on your own testimonials is explicitly against Google's structured data guidelines. It is ignored at best and penalised at worst. Reviews should be marked up by the platform hosting them, not by you.

Validate, then check it stays valid

Use Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org's validator. Then re-check after any theme or plugin update — schema breaks silently, and nothing tells you. This site's markup is generated from a single source so it can't drift, which is worth replicating however you build.

Don't confuse volume with quality

Twelve nested schema types on a page with thin content does nothing. Markup describes content; it does not substitute for it. Get the page structure right first.