Structured data for a small business

Structured data is a block of machine-readable statements added to a page describing what is on it: that this page is about a business, that the business has this address, these opening hours, this phone number, that this article was written by this person on this date.

It restates facts that are already visible on the page in a format a machine can consume without interpreting the layout. That is its whole function, and understanding that keeps expectations in the right place.

What it does and does not do

Claim	Position
Improves rankings	No. It is not a ranking input
Makes a page eligible for enhanced result formats	Yes, for the types that have them
Guarantees those formats appear	No. Eligibility is not selection
Helps machines state facts unambiguously	Yes, and this is the durable benefit
Substitutes for content on the page	No, and doing so is the main way it goes wrong

The fourth row is becoming the more interesting one. Systems that answer questions by assembling facts benefit from facts stated without ambiguity, and structured data is the format for that. It is still not a ranking mechanism.

The types worth having on a small business site

Most sites need three, and a fourth in some cases.

Organisation or LocalBusiness. Who the business is, where it is, how to contact it, when it is open. On a site with a physical location or a defined service area this is the one that earns its place.

BreadcrumbList. The page’s position in the site’s structure. Cheap, automatic on most platforms, and it can appear in the result itself.

FAQPage. Where a page genuinely contains questions and answers. The requirement that the questions be visible on the page is enforced, and pages have lost eligibility for marking up questions that were not there.

Article, where the site publishes articles. Author, publication date, headline.

Beyond those, the field expands quickly into types that are specific to products, events, courses, recipes and jobs. If a business genuinely does those things, the corresponding types apply. If it does not, adding them is inventing facts.

What LocalBusiness and OpeningHoursSpecification markup actually looks like

The schema.org vocabulary behind the LocalBusiness type most small sites use is plain JSON-LD, and opening hours are the part worth seeing in its actual form, since “opening hours” as a phrase hides a genuinely structured shape underneath:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Example Business",
  "openingHoursSpecification": {
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
    "opens": "09:00",
    "closes": "17:00"
  }
}

Each day or group of days gets its own dayOfWeek, opens and closes set — a business open different hours on different days needs more than one OpeningHoursSpecification block, one per distinct pattern, rather than a single block trying to average the week. This is exactly the kind of detail a plugin-generated block gets right or wrong silently, which is why checking the generated markup against the two questions in the next section matters more than knowing the syntax by heart.

The rules that attach

Two conditions run across every published guideline for structured data, and they are the part that is left out when it is sold as an add-on.

It must describe content actually on the page. Marking up content that is not visible to a visitor is the specific behaviour that attracts action, and action here means losing eligibility for the enhanced formats across the site rather than for one page.

It must be accurate. Opening hours that are wrong, an address that is out of date, a phone number that has changed. Structured data ages exactly like the rest of a site and is less likely to be noticed, because nobody reads it.

The Australian considerations

Two types deserve a caution that has nothing to do with search guidelines.

Review and rating markup. Star ratings in a search result are attractive and the rules around them are stricter than most implementations assume: reviews must be genuine, collected from real customers, and not selectively filtered. Beyond the search guidelines, misleading representations about goods and services are dealt with under the Australian Consumer Law, and a rating assembled from testimonials the business chose is a representation. This site does not publish rating markup at all, and the reasoning is on the disclosure statement. The schema.org type name behind this kind of result, for reference, is AggregateRating.

Regulated professions. In several Australian health professions, advertising rules restrict testimonials about clinical services. Structured data that publishes those testimonials in a machine-readable form is still publishing them. Where a site operates in a regulated field the industry pages set out what differs, on the industries section.

Where it comes from

On most platforms a plugin or a theme generates the common types automatically, and the practical build task is to check what it produced rather than to write it. Two checks are worth doing.

Does the generated markup match the page? Business name, address, hours, phone.

Is more than one block being generated? Two plugins each producing a LocalBusiness block for the same page is a common outcome of an inherited site, and the result is a page making two slightly different claims about the same business.

Testing it

Structured data is testable, which distinguishes it from most things sold alongside it. Google and Schema.org both publish validators that report what a machine reads from a page and which required properties are missing.

Testing takes a minute per template rather than per page, because the markup is generated from a template. Testing one page of each type is sufficient.

What to ask a supplier

• Which types are being added, and to which page types?
• Is the markup generated by the platform, and if so by which component?
• Are the business details in it drawn from one source, or typed in separately from the visible ones?

The third question is the one that predicts whether the markup will still be correct in two years. Details typed in twice diverge.

What to do next

Run one page of each template through a structured data validator and read what it says your business is. On many small business sites the answer is out of date, empty, or duplicated. All three are cheap to fix and none of them is visible from the page itself. The rest of the build-side list is on search readiness, and the commercial scope of a build is on the services section.