How to add LocalBusiness schema

Before you start

• Your exact business details as they appear on your profile
• Access to the templates

The steps

1. 1

   Step 1: Choose the most specific type

   LocalBusiness has subtypes — Plumber, Electrician, Store. Use the specific one where it exists.

2. 2

   Step 2: Match your profile exactly

   Name, address and phone must be byte-identical to your business profile and every directory listing.

3. 3

   Step 3: Add geo coordinates

   For a service-area business use the city centre, not a home address.

4. 4

   Step 4: Declare service area if you travel

   A GeoCircle with a radius, or named areas — rather than a street address you do not trade from.

5. 5

   Step 5: Add opening hours

   openingHoursSpecification with days and times, including exceptions.

6. 6

   Step 6: Link it into your graph

   Reference it from the WebPage node with about, and connect founder or employee where relevant.

7. 7

   Step 7: Validate and deploy

   Then check the live HTML rather than the template.

Do not add review markup

Reviews on your Google profile belong there and should not be copied into your own schema. Self-hosted review markup is ineligible for rich results and is the most commonly penalised structured-data violation.

What the markup does and does not affect

It clarifies your entity for search engines and answer engines. It does not drive local pack rankings — profile completeness, proximity and reviews do that, and no amount of schema substitutes.

Keep it consistent with everything else

The name, address and phone in your schema must match your business profile and your visible page footer exactly. A mismatch between markup and visible content is a structured-data violation in its own right, and a mismatch between markup and your profile undoes the entity clarity the markup existed to provide. Generating all three from one configuration value is the only version of this that stays correct.

The background behind this

Local SEO when customers do not come to your address covers the reasoning in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.