Key takeaways
- Schema describes what is already on the page; it does not replace good content.
- Organization, Article, Product, LocalBusiness and BreadcrumbList cover most sites.
- Never mark up content that visitors cannot see, and never mark up your own reviews.
Schema markup is a block of structured data, usually written as JSON-LD, that tells machines what a page is about: a business, an article, a product, a list of questions. It does not make weak content strong, but it removes guesswork for search engines and AI assistants that read your pages.
The types worth adding
- Organization and WebSite across the whole site, naming the business and its official profiles
- Article or BlogPosting on posts, with the author and dates
- Product on product pages, with price and availability only where the page shows them
- LocalBusiness for businesses with a location or service area
- BreadcrumbList to show where a page sits
- FAQPage where a page has real questions and answers, remembering that search engines now show fewer FAQ results but can still read the data
Types to skip
Some types no longer produce visible results in search, such as HowTo. Adding them costs time and can clutter the page's data. Add markup for what is useful, not for everything that exists.
Mistakes to avoid
- Marking up content that is not on the page
- Marking up reviews that you wrote about yourself
- Letting the markup disagree with the visible text, such as a different price
- Leaving out required fields, so the markup is ignored
- Copying a block between pages without updating it
How to check it
- Validate each template with a structured data testing tool
- Compare the markup with the visible page line by line
- Recheck after any change to the template or the data behind it
Structured data is part of our entity and schema service, and you can draft markup with the free JSON-LD builder.