Freelance Local SEO and WordPress Consultant: How To Properly Use Schema Markup For Local Business?

How To Use Schema Markup For Local Business?

How To Properly Implement Schema Markup For Local Business Website To Improve Search Visibility?

Today I Came Across Quora and Found a Question About How To Use Schema Markup For Plumber and HVAC Business Website To Improve SEO?

I answered the question and I thought It would be great, If I publish my answer here at my Blog.

Google's search result pages support Semantic Markup that allows local business owners to provide information about their business by using schema.org vocabulary. By providing with a mix of required, recommended and optional properties with values for the https://schema.org/LocalBusiness class, a business can now provide Google with information about things like the business's name, address, telephone number, physical location and hours of operation in a machine readable way.

This also called structured data markup, and can be eligible to appear in two categories of Google Search features:

Rich Results Snippet: Structured data for things like recipes, articles, and videos can appear in Rich Cards, as either a single element or a list of items. Other kinds of structured data can enhance the appearance of your site in Search, such as with Breadcrumbs, or a Sitelinks Search Box.

Google Knowledge Graph Cards: If you're the authority for certain content, Google can treat the structured data on your site as factual and import it into the Knowledge Graph, where it can power prominent answers in Search and across Google properties. Knowledge Graph cards appear for authoritative data about organizations, and events. Movie reviews, and movie/music play actions, while based on ranking, can also appear in Knowledge Graph cards once they are reconciled to Knowledge Graph entities.

Google has supported the provision of local business information with schema.org since April 08, 2014, but this is the first time they've published prescribed property specifications for Local Business.

You can provide structured data markup in your HTML and AMP pages. Google Support Following Structured Data Markup Formats:

Microdata: Microdata is a WHATWG HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users.

JSON-LD (Google Recommended Format): JavaScript notation separate from the body of the HTML itself. Markup is placed inside a script tag in the head of the HTML page. The markup does not have to be interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express, such as the Country of a PostalAddress of a MusicVenue of an Event. Also, Google can read JSON-LD data when it is dynamically injected into the page's contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content management system.

RDFa: RDFa (or Resource Description Framework in Attributes) is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The RDF data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. It also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.

How To Implement Schema Markup For Local Business Website To Improve Search Visibility?

Make sure your Plumbing and HVAC Business Contact and Geographic Information is implemented correctly on your website should be the first step when it comes to implementing schema markup onto your website.

The Local Business section of https://schema.org/LocalBusiness has a variety of categories that businesses can implement as part of the footer or contact page of their website, including address, phone, fax, operating hours, and even accepted payment types.

Microdata Example For Plumbing Service

The microdata schema markup is displayed via div tags and isn’t displayed on the live version of the website. The div tags designate the information that applies to the chosen schema markup:

<div itemscope="" itemtype="”https://schema.org/Plumber”">
<span itemprop="”name”">ABC Plumber</span>
<br />
<div itemprop="”address”" itemscope="" itemtype="”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”">
<span itemprop="”streetAddress”">123 Main Street</span>
<span itemprop="”addressLocality”">Phoenix</span>,
<span itemprop="”addressRegion”">AZ</span>
<span itemprop="”postalCode”">85001</span>
</div>
Phone: <span itemprop="”telephone”">555-555-5555</span>
<a href="http://googlemapsurl.com" itemprop="”maps”">URL of Map</a>
</div>

In this example for an Plumber’s Business, the only information that is displayed on the public-facing side of the website is the information between the span and div tags. Visitors won’t be able to tell that a business is using schema unless they view your website source code.

The ‘itemprop’ in the span tag identifies the schema markup property for that piece of information. All available properties are shown on Home - schema.org in their applicable category.

JSON-LD Structured Data Example For HVAC Contractor

Below is an example of a common JSON-LD syntax which can be used to define a single HVAC Company Business Information: