--- title: "Local Business Schema: What to Add and What to Skip" description: "Schema markup does not help Google find your business. It helps Google understand it. There is a difference, and it matters when you are deciding what to add. Most guides tell you to mark up everything. The result is bloated, often contradictory code that does more damage than a clean, minimal implementation. The properties that genuinely move the needle for local search are fewer than most people expect." url: "https://yorkshiredesign.co.uk/local-business-schema-markup-what-to-add-and-what-to-skip/" type: "BlogPosting" language: "en-GB" published: 2026-10-14 site: "Yorkshire Design" --- # Local Business Schema Markup: What to Add and What to Skip > Schema markup does not help Google find your business. It helps Google understand it. There is a difference, and it matters when you are deciding what to add. Most guides tell you to mark up everything. The result is bloated, often contradictory code that does more damage than a clean, minimal implementation. The properties that genuinely move the needle for local search are fewer than most people expect. Key facts: - Google consistently reads only a handful of core LocalBusiness properties and ignores most others. - Setting up opening hours correctly takes about ten minutes to do properly. - You can only mark up ratings that live on your own website. - JSON-LD is Google's recommended format because it sits separately from your HTML. ## 1. Start With What Google Actually Uses The [Schema.org LocalBusiness type](https://schema.org/LocalBusiness) is the foundation. From there, Google consistently reads a handful of core properties and ignores most of the rest. The safest approach is to mark up what directly powers search features, and leave everything else out. The properties that earn their place are your business name, address, telephone number, opening hours, website URL, and your business type. Each one maps to something Google surfaces in search results or in the Knowledge Panel. Mark those up correctly and the rest is optional at best. ### Get your business type right Using the generic LocalBusiness type when a more specific one exists is a missed opportunity. Schema.org carries hundreds of subtypes: Plumber, DentalClinic, LegalService, AutoRepair. The more precise the type, the less inferring Google has to do. Check the Schema.org hierarchy and go as specific as the list allows for your actual trade. ### Address consistency is non-negotiable Your marked-up address must match your Google Business Profile exactly, including punctuation and abbreviations. If your profile says "St" and your schema says "Street", you have introduced a small conflict that erodes the confidence structured data is supposed to build. Pick one format and stick to it across every platform. ## 2. Opening Hours Need a Specific Format Plain text opening hours do nothing useful for search engines. The openingHoursSpecification property, with separate day-of-week entries and opens and closes times in 24-hour format, is what drives the "open now" and "closes at 6pm" displays you see in local results. Getting this wrong means Google either ignores it or defaults to nothing. A business showing no hours in search is less likely to get a call from someone unsure whether you are open. It is a small detail that takes about ten minutes to set up properly, but it is the sort of thing that quietly shapes whether someone contacts you or scrolls past. ## 3. Ratings, the Rule Most Implementations Break If your site hosts genuine customer reviews, the aggregateRating property is worth including. However, the rule here is strict and widely ignored. You can only mark up ratings that live on your own website. Pulling your Google rating or your Trustpilot score and presenting it as your own site's data is against both Schema.org's specification and Google's rich results guidelines. Google has taken a clear position on this. Rich results built on third-party scores scraped onto your own page can lead to manual actions. The safe answer is to either collect and host reviews directly on your site, or leave aggregateRating out entirely. ## 4. The Properties That Look Useful but Are Not This is where most implementations go wrong. Properties get added because they exist in the schema vocabulary, not because they serve a purpose. A few worth skipping: - **description** with keyword-heavy text. Google does not use this field for rich results. It reads as an attempt to feed keywords through a back channel, and it does not work. - **sameAs** pointing to neglected social profiles. If the Facebook page linked has not been updated in two years, the signal is worse than no signal. - **priceRange** using symbols like ££. Useful in certain verticals like restaurants, but for most trades it adds nothing to how your result appears. - **image** property linking to a logo or photo. Schema.org supports it, but in practice local business image display in search comes from Google Business Profile, not your on-page markup. Stripped back schema is almost always cleaner than comprehensive schema. Every unused property is another field that could conflict with data elsewhere on the page. ## 5. JSON-LD Is the Right Format There are three ways to add structured data to a page: JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa. Google has consistently recommended JSON-LD because it sits separately from your HTML rather than tangled through it. A single script block in the page head keeps the markup away from your content, which makes it easier to maintain and easier to audit. If you are on WordPress, most technical SEO plugins generate basic JSON-LD automatically. The problem is they tend to either under-populate the schema with real business data, or over-populate it with every available property regardless of whether it is accurate. Either way, manual review of the output is worth the time before you publish. ## 6. Bad Content Around Good Schema Still Hurts You Schema markup does not operate in isolation. In our experience working with a local company whose site was damaged by an SEO campaign that produced hundreds of poorly targeted pages, the structured data on the site became almost irrelevant because the content around it sent contradictory quality signals. Google's assessment of a page covers the whole page, not just the machine-readable layer beneath it. Clean schema on a page full of thin or irrelevant content does not produce the results people expect. The markup is a supporting signal. It works best when the rest of the page earns its place. ## 7. Test Before You Publish Google's [Rich Results Test](https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) shows exactly what Google reads from your structured data and flags any errors or warnings. Run it before the page goes live, and again after any update to the page or the schema block. A property that was valid six months ago may have been deprecated since. The test also tells you which rich result types your markup qualifies for. If a feature you expected to see is missing, the tool usually points to the specific field causing the problem. It takes two minutes and removes all the guesswork.