Schema Markup: Which Types Are Worth Adding

Structured data is a description of your page written for machines rather than readers. It sits in the source code and states, in a vocabulary search engines agree on, that this string is a price, that one is an opening time, and this block is a job advert.

It is not a ranking factor. Adding it will not move you up the results page on its own, and anyone selling it as a ranking service is stretching. What it does is make your page eligible for specific presentation features — stars, prices, breadcrumbs, event dates — and eligibility is not a guarantee either. Google decides whether to show them.

That sounds like a poor deal until you consider what those features do to click-through. A result that carries a price and a date occupies more space and answers more of the question before the click. That is the return, and it is worth having where you can get it.

Types that still earn something

Organization. The baseline. Your legal name, logo, contact details and sameAs links to your verified social and directory profiles. This is how you tell search engines which entity the site belongs to, which matters increasingly as results are assembled from knowledge about entities rather than pages. Put it on the homepage.

LocalBusiness. If you have premises customers visit, or a defined service area, use the most specific subtype that fits — Dentist, Plumber, Restaurant — rather than the generic parent. Include the address exactly as it appears on your Google Business Profile, the phone number, opening hours and geo-coordinates. Consistency between this markup, your site’s visible contact details and your profile is the point of the exercise.

BreadcrumbList. Modest, reliable and easy. It replaces the raw URL under your result with a readable path. Low effort, small but consistent gain.

Product with Offer. Essential for ecommerce. Price, currency and availability can appear directly in results. Keep it accurate — markup that contradicts the page is a policy problem, and prices go stale faster than anything else on a site.

Event. If you run classes, workshops or ticketed dates, this is one of the strongest remaining features. Dates and locations surface prominently.

JobPosting. If you recruit, this puts your vacancy into the jobs experience. For a small employer competing with agencies on paid boards, that is a meaningful free channel.

VideoObject. Worth adding if video is genuinely part of your pages. Enables thumbnails and key moments.

Recipe, Course, Book and similar verticals. Narrow, but strong where they apply. If your business fits one of them, check the specific documentation rather than generalising from this list.

Article or BlogPosting. Fine to include and cheap to automate through a template. Be realistic: it no longer buys a distinct rich result for most publishers. It helps search engines parse authorship and dates.

Types that are no longer worth the effort

This is where a lot of advice online has gone stale.

FAQPage. In August 2023 Google restricted FAQ rich results to well-known, authoritative government and health sites. For everyone else they stopped appearing regularly. Plenty of agencies still sell FAQ schema as a way to occupy more of the results page. For a typical small business, it will not. Keep an FAQ section on the page if it helps readers — that is a good reason on its own — but do not expect the markup to earn you anything.

HowTo. Cut back at the same time, to desktop only, and it has not been a dependable feature since.

Review and AggregateRating on your own business. This is the one people get wrong most often. Google treats reviews about an entity, published on that entity’s own website, as self-serving. If you mark up your own testimonials with AggregateRating inside LocalBusiness or Organization markup, the page is not eligible for the star feature — whether you wrote the markup by hand or an embedded third-party widget produced it. Star ratings for your business appear from your Google Business Profile, not from your own code. Review markup still works for reviews you publish about other things, such as a product you sell.

Speakable, and most of the experimental types. Interesting, rarely applicable.

There is no harm in leaving unused structured data in place. It simply has no visible effect.

Implementation, briefly

Use JSON-LD in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block. Google recommends it, it sits apart from your HTML so it survives design changes, and it is far easier to debug than microdata woven through the markup.

Four rules keep you out of trouble:

1. Only mark up what is visible on the page. Marking up content a user cannot see is against the structured data guidelines, and the enforcement is real.
2. Keep it accurate and current. A price that changed last month or an event that finished is worse than no markup.
3. One primary type per page, with related entities nested inside it. Ten competing blocks on one page invites the wrong one to win.
4. Fill in the recommended properties, not just the required ones. Eligibility usually hinges on the optional fields.

Most CMS platforms generate some of this automatically. Check what yours already outputs before adding your own — duplicated, conflicting blocks are a common result of installing a plugin on top of a theme that was already handling it.

How to check it works

Rich Results Test. Google’s own tool, and the only one that tells you which features a URL is actually eligible for. Test the live URL, not pasted code, so you catch anything JavaScript is failing to render.

Schema Markup Validator. Validates the vocabulary itself, including types Google does not use. Useful for structural errors.

Search Console enhancement reports. The section that matters. Once Google has crawled your pages, these reports show errors and warnings across the whole site rather than one URL at a time, and they tell you what is being seen in the wild.

Check after every theme update. Structured data is quietly broken by redesigns more often than by anything else.

What to expect afterwards

Be clear about the sequence. You add markup, Google recrawls the page, the page becomes eligible, and then Google may or may not display the feature for a given query. Rich results appear and disappear with the layout of the results page, which changes constantly.

So treat this as a small, permanent improvement to how your pages are understood and presented, made once and maintained. Compare click-through rate in Search Console for the affected pages before and after, with a decent window either side, and judge it on that. If nothing changes, the markup was still correct — it just was not the constraint on your visibility.

Where structured data genuinely earns its place is a site that already ranks and is not being clicked. If you are not ranking yet, fix that first. The technical foundations and the content come before the garnish.