Types of schema and ways to set them up on the local business websites
If you are familiar with the word ‘schema’ by now, it is time to move on to the next topic. I.e. the types of schema needed for your local business website.
Please note that all the types of schema discussed here are a simple guide of ‘local’ specific schema. Some of them may be irrelevant to your business.
Core Business Information (Name, Address & Phone)
When you build a website for your business, the most important task will be providing the core business data and information like-
- Business Name
- Business Address
- Business Phone
- Business Lat / Long
- Business Logo
- Business Description
All this information can be added easily by using the ‘LocalBusiness’ schema-type.
Make sure to utilize the latitude longitude finder tool.
You have to divide the data into three components while building the schema for your website. The components are- street address, city, state and postal code.
Author Markup
The author markup is very important to increase the rank of your website in the search engines. A large part of the algorithm works as a big factor to level up your page. Not only this, author markup provides a lot of information to Google regarding your business.
You can enable the schema authorship for your business in the following ways:
- Method – Connect your Google+ profile
This is the simplest method to get your author data markup. It enables you to link your Google+ profile to your page so that people can easily know who you are.
The process is very easy. Just add the link anywhere in your page and replace {google_url} with the Google+ profile URL.
- Method – Utilize schema.org format to mention author information
In case you do not have a Google+ profile or do not want to link that profile to your website, there is an alternate way to provide author information as structured. This is not as effective as the first method, but still better than not having any author markup.
Review Markup
When you add reviews in schema markup format, it allows you to display rich snippets. These include both the accumulated review rating and the review count in the search engine result pages.
You must use two different schema objects such as- ‘aggregate rating’ and ‘review’ for your schema markup.
The aggregate rating method refers to the overall rating scores including average rating across all reviews and the total number of reviews. On the other hand, the review object shows your actual review text and content. If you want to add more reviews, create a new ‘review’ block providing a review.
A word of advice: If you want to experience a seamless markup, do it by marking up your testimonials page. You have to add hidden schema on all of your pages to let the rich snippets show up for those pages on your website.
Products Markup
If you have products or services to offer, go for the product markup format. Marking them up will help the users to find them while browsing in the search engine.
You can give a brief idea on the products you offer within the product schema object. It is especially useful for them who do not sell specific products.
Offers Markup
Though the offers schema markup object is not as fruitful as other types of microdata, it is good to use this markup on your website.
The offers markup object can be used to mark the prices of different products and services provided by you.
How does the schema-ed content show to consistent users?
The schema marked up contents is displayed just like the other contents in your website. By marking up the contents, you are actually adding tags to those contents. These tags are invisible to your users.
How to display “invisible” schema?
You may want to markup your website’s contents without revealing them on the page. For example, you may want to display the aggregate rating on all the pages on the website without letting the users see them.
It is done by adding the text within ‘content’. Do not make it a part of the indexable content if you want to hide the markup.
Typically the aggregate rating block is:
The content lying within span and /span is without adding to a new attribute named content.
How is schema connected with a page?
It is important to know how structured data are included within a page. The schema that you add in a page is associated with that specific page. It is not included in any other pages on the website.
If you provide your address on the contact page as a schema, Google will add that data on that particular contact page keeping other pages totally unchanged. For reviews, they are only referenced in your testimonials page. The users will only find the rich snippets for the testimonials. Reviews will not be available for any other page on your website.
In the above circumstances, it would be the best idea to include both your aggregate rating and author markup across all the pages within your website. Do it by placing it in the common footer or header as the invisible schema block.
Tools & Additional Reading Material
- Google Local Tool from Travis Van Slooten is a very useful tool for generating a local schema for the name, address and phone number.
- The Reviews Schema Generator let you markup the reviews in a convenient way.
- Hallam Internet Marketing has a short yet intuitive guide about Schema Markup for Local Businesses.
- Schema.org includes different types of schema and documentation about them.
- In case you want to know more about Local Schema or anything related to Local SEO, head over to Catalyst’s Local SEO Forum.