A few tweaks to your website can light up a neon sign above your local business details so search engines can find them.
Schema also helps you mark up important pages you want search engines to display as site navigation links that can benefit local users, such as a store locator.
The fact that marking up your local business data with schema improves the chances of landing more SERP real estate could mean higher click-through rates, more traffic and even improved local rankings.
So while search engines do rely on data from Google Business Profiles and other prominent directories to display the best information to users, they also check your website, so it pays to mark up your data properly with local business structured data.
Go further: Semrush´s Listing Management tool is the quickest way to distribute business details to top directories and allows you to edit them all in one simple interface, ensuring your listings are consistent with the local business schema markup on your website.
And here’s the same information displayed as schema markup ready to be embedded on a website.
Fortunately, schema.org website makes it easy for local businesses to find the right schema markup for your situation, so even if you don’t know how to code, it’s pretty easy to fill in your details from a template.
There are also plenty of free tools available that make it really simple to output the markup code, like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper .
The tool allows you to click relevant areas of your website to populate schema tags, so you don’t even need to type anything out.
But while you can generate your markup with the help of the schema.org website or Google’s local business schema generator, installing it might be a bit trickier for non-techies.
The markup needs to be placed on your website within the HTML source code, but if pasting it in yourself is beyond your technical abilities, you can use a Wordpress plugin or a tool like Schema App . Failing that, ask an experienced web developer to do it for you.
The bigger picture: Semrush users can easily check which keywords are bringing up rich snippets in Google, with a snapshot of the SERP available for each one.
It’s a good idea to connect your website to Google Search Console so it alerts you to any errors in your local business schema markup, as well as sending other useful notifications that might affect local SEO.
It’s important to keep up to date with changes to schema code to make sure you’ve got the latest markup published on your website. You can stay informed about changes to schema, as well as other Google projects and services, on the search engine’s What’s New page.
On top of making sure your markup is working correctly, you also need to make sure your local schema aligns with your overall local SEO strategy.
Google might get confused if it finds your schema local business category isn’t at all related to the rest of the content on your site, so thorough keyword research and a quality content strategy will go a long way to complementing your markup.
And now that your NAP data (name, address, phone number) is super easy for search engines to find on your website, it needs to be in sync with the details published on your Google Business Profile and other prominent directories like Yelp and Facebook.
Ignoring NAP consistency is likely to negatively impact your local SEO rankings because search engines will quickly determine that your business’ data is unreliable.