Structured data

A search engine reads your HTML and guesses what it describes. Structured data removes the guess. A JSON-LD block in the page declares entities and their properties using the schema.org vocabulary: this is an organization, this is its address, this is a service, these are the questions and answers on the page.

For a service business, the types that matter most are Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList and Article. Google uses them to decide whether a page is eligible for rich results. AI systems that assemble answers (AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity) lean on the same entity signals, plus the sameAs links that connect your site to your other profiles, to confirm who your brand is before citing it.

It does not improve rankings on its own. What it changes is eligibility and clarity, and both matter more as search becomes generative. It also has one hard rule: the markup must describe what is actually visible on the page. Marking up reviews that are not shown, or an FAQ that does not exist, is the fastest route to a manual action.

People often mix up structured data and meta tags, because both live in the code and visitors never see them. They do different jobs. Meta tags such as the title tag, the meta description and meta robots tell a search engine how to display or treat one page. Structured data describes the things the page is about and how they relate to each other.

The two have to agree. A page whose title says “SEO agency in Buenos Aires” while its markup declares a different name or city sends two versions of the same fact, and the search engine has to choose one.

This is the order we follow on a WordPress site, whether the markup comes from a plugin, from the theme or from a JSON-LD block written by hand.

• List the entities each template represents. A home page usually carries Organization, a service page Service, a location page LocalBusiness, a blog post Article, and almost every page BreadcrumbList.
• Check what already prints. Read the page source or run a Screaming Frog crawl with structured data extraction turned on, so you find duplicates from plugins before adding anything new.
• Write or configure the JSON-LD with real values: the name exactly as it appears on your Google Business Profile, the full address, the phone, opening hours and sameAs links to active profiles. Give the Organization a stable @id and reference it from the other entities.
• Test one URL per template in Google’s Rich Results Test to confirm eligibility, then in the Schema Markup Validator to catch syntax and vocabulary problems the first tool ignores.
• Publish and request indexing for a few key URLs with URL Inspection in Google Search Console.
• Watch the Enhancements reports in Search Console over the following weeks. They cover the whole site, which is where template problems show up.
• Crawl again after every theme, plugin or content model change. Schema breaks silently when a template changes.

• The markup describes only what a visitor can see on the page.
• Name, address and phone match the Google Business Profile character for character.
• sameAs points only to real, active profiles of the brand.
• There is one Organization entity, referenced by the same @id on every page.
• FAQPage appears only where the questions are visible on the page.
• Schema is re-tested after every theme or plugin update, because updates silently remove or duplicate it.

AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity build answers from pages they can retrieve and trust. Markup does not guarantee a citation, and no AI provider publishes a rule saying it does. What it offers them is a clean, machine-readable statement of who you are, where you are and what you offer, which they can cross-check against your Business Profile, LinkedIn and directory listings.

In local search the connection is more direct. A LocalBusiness entity with the same name, address and phone as your Google Business Profile reinforces the link between your website and your map listing. When someone asks an assistant for an agency, a dentist or a repair service in a specific neighborhood, the pages that state their location clearly, in the text and in the markup, are the easiest ones to confirm.

1. Small service business.Organization, LocalBusiness and FAQPage on a handful of pages cover most of the value. Getting the address and phone exactly right matters more than adding many types.
2. E-commerce.Product markup with price, availability and reviews that are visible on the page makes product listings eligible for richer results. With thousands of products the markup has to come from the template and stay in sync with stock and price data, or it becomes wrong at scale.
3. Multilingual site like ours.Each language version needs its own markup in its own language, pointing to the same Organization @id. We keep one entity for North Blue across the English and Spanish pages, so search engines see two versions of one agency instead of two agencies.
4. Local business serving several areas.Each location page should describe a real place with a real address. If you serve an area where you have no office, describe that service area in the text instead of declaring a LocalBusiness that does not exist.

If none of these fits yet, start with Organization and BreadcrumbList. They are easy to get right, and every type you add later builds on them.

• Marking up reviews or ratings that are not shown on the page.
• Two plugins (or a theme and a plugin) each printing their own Organization block, sometimes with different names.
• Stale data: an old phone number or old opening hours left in the markup after they changed everywhere else.
• Adding schema and expecting positions to jump. It makes a page eligible for features; content and links still decide rankings.

If your business serves a specific area, structured data is part of local SEO; if you want to be quoted in AI answers, it is part of answer engine optimization.