Schema Markup for Local Businesses: A Practical Overview

Two Houston plumbing companies show up in Google search results for “emergency plumber near me.” One listing displays a plain blue link with a basic description. The other shows a 4.8-star rating from 247 reviews, business hours indicating they’re open right now, a price range, and a direct click-to-call button.

Both companies offer comparable services. Both have decent websites. But the second listing gets clicked significantly more often — studies consistently show that rich results drive 20-30% higher click-through rates compared to standard listings.

The difference between these two search appearances comes down to one thing: schema markup.

What Schema Markup Actually Is

Schema markup is a standardized vocabulary of code that gets added to a website’s pages to help search engines understand what the content means, not just what it says.

Think of it this way: a search engine can read that a page contains the text “713-555-0100” — but without context, it doesn’t know if that’s a phone number, an account number, or a product SKU. Schema markup tells the search engine explicitly: “This is the business phone number for this local plumber in Houston, Texas.”

The markup itself comes from Schema.org, a collaborative project maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex. It provides a shared vocabulary that all major search engines recognize and process.

When a search engine encounters schema markup on a page, it can do two important things:

Understand the content more accurately, which can improve how and when the page appears in relevant searches.
Display enhanced search results (called rich results or rich snippets) that include additional information like ratings, hours, prices, and FAQ answers directly in the search listing.

For local businesses, this additional context can make a meaningful difference in how their listings appear and perform in search results.

Types of Schema Most Relevant to Local Businesses

Schema.org defines hundreds of markup types, but only a handful tend to matter significantly for local service businesses. Here are the ones that Houston businesses most commonly benefit from.

LocalBusiness Schema

This is the foundation. LocalBusiness schema tells search engines the essential facts about a business: name, address, phone number, hours of operation, geographic service area, and business type.

Google uses this information to verify and enhance local search listings. Businesses that implement LocalBusiness schema often find that their Google Business Profile information and website information align more consistently in search results.

Key properties within LocalBusiness schema include:

name — The official business name
address — Full street address with city, state, and ZIP
telephone — Primary contact number
openingHoursSpecification — Operating hours for each day
geo — Latitude and longitude coordinates
areaServed — Geographic service area
priceRange — General price range indicator (e.g., ”$$”)

Schema.org also offers more specific subtypes like Plumber, Electrician, Attorney, AccountingService, AutoRepair, and dozens of others. Using the most specific applicable subtype helps search engines categorize a business more precisely.

Service Schema

For businesses that offer multiple services, Service schema allows each service to be described individually with its own name, description, service area, and pricing information.

A Houston landscaping company, for example, could mark up separate services for lawn maintenance, irrigation installation, tree trimming, and landscape design. Each service gets its own structured description that search engines can process independently.

This becomes particularly valuable when someone searches for a specific service rather than a business category. “Irrigation system repair in Katy” is more likely to surface businesses that have explicitly marked up irrigation repair as a distinct service.

FAQ Schema

FAQ schema is one of the most visible types in search results. When implemented, it can cause a listing to display expandable question-and-answer pairs directly in the search results — sometimes taking up significantly more visual space on the page.

For a Houston business, FAQ schema might mark up questions like:

“What areas of Houston do you serve?”
“How long does a typical foundation inspection take?”
“Do you offer emergency weekend service?”

Each question and its answer appears as a dropdown in the search listing. This not only provides useful information to searchers but also pushes competing results further down the page, increasing the marked-up listing’s visual dominance.

Review and AggregateRating Schema

AggregateRating schema tells search engines about a business’s overall review profile — the average rating, the total number of reviews, and the rating scale. This is what generates those star ratings visible directly in search results.

The impact is straightforward: listings with visible star ratings attract more attention and more clicks. A listing showing “4.7 stars from 312 reviews” communicates credibility instantly, before the searcher even reads the description.

It’s worth noting that Google has specific guidelines about review schema. The reviews must be genuine, directly collected, and represent the business being reviewed. Misusing review schema can result in a manual penalty.

Product Schema

Businesses that sell products — whether physical goods or defined service packages — can use Product schema to display pricing, availability, and review information in search results.

A Houston auto parts store might use Product schema to show specific part prices and availability directly in search listings. A web development agency might mark up defined service packages with their starting prices.

BreadcrumbList Schema

While less flashy than star ratings or FAQ dropdowns, BreadcrumbList schema improves how a site’s navigation structure appears in search results. Instead of showing a raw URL, Google displays a clean breadcrumb trail like:

EZQ Marketing > Services > Web Development

This gives searchers a clearer understanding of where a page sits within a website and can improve click-through rates for deeper pages that might otherwise look unfamiliar.

How Rich Snippets Appear in Search Results

Schema markup powers several distinct types of enhanced search appearances. Here’s what they look like in practice.

Star ratings and review counts appear as gold stars beneath the page title, along with the number of reviews. These are among the most click-influencing elements in search results.

Business information panels display hours, address, phone number, and a map pin. These often appear in the knowledge panel on the right side of desktop results or at the top of mobile results.

FAQ dropdowns show expandable questions directly in the search listing. Each question can be clicked to reveal the answer without leaving the search results page.

Sitelinks search box allows users to search within a specific website directly from Google’s results page — though this is more common for larger sites.

How-to steps display numbered instructions for process-oriented content, which can be particularly useful for businesses that publish educational content.

Price and availability indicators show product pricing and in-stock status for e-commerce and product-oriented listings.

Not every page with schema markup will display rich results — Google decides when and how to show them based on the search query, the quality of the page, and other factors. But without schema markup, these enhanced displays simply aren’t possible.

Implementation: JSON-LD Is the Standard

There are three formats for implementing schema markup: JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa. In practice, JSON-LD is the clear standard and the format Google explicitly recommends.

JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) has a significant practical advantage: it’s added as a script block in the page’s <head> section, completely separate from the visible HTML content. This means implementing or updating schema doesn’t require touching the page’s design or content structure.

Here’s a simplified example of what LocalBusiness JSON-LD looks like for a Houston business:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Plumber",
  "name": "ABC Plumbing Houston",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "1234 Main Street",
    "addressLocality": "Houston",
    "addressRegion": "TX",
    "postalCode": "77001"
  },
  "telephone": "+1-713-555-0100",
  "openingHoursSpecification": [
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
      "opens": "07:00",
      "closes": "18:00"
    }
  ],
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude": "29.7604",
    "longitude": "-95.3698"
  },
  "areaServed": {
    "@type": "City",
    "name": "Houston"
  },
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": "4.8",
    "reviewCount": "247"
  }
}

This block of code sits invisibly in the page header. Visitors never see it. But search engines read it, process it, and use it to generate enhanced search displays.

For businesses using content management systems, many platforms offer schema markup plugins or built-in tools. WordPress sites commonly use plugins like Rank Math or Yoast SEO. Custom-built sites typically have schema added directly by the developer.

Common Schema Types for Houston Service Businesses

Different types of Houston businesses tend to benefit from different schema combinations. Here are some common patterns:

Home service businesses (plumbers, electricians, HVAC, roofing) — LocalBusiness subtype + Service + FAQ + AggregateRating. The service-specific subtype helps with categorization, while Service schema captures each distinct offering.

Professional service firms (law firms, accounting firms, consultants) — ProfessionalService or specific subtype + Service + FAQ + Person (for individual practitioners) + AggregateRating.

Restaurants and food businesses — Restaurant + Menu + AggregateRating + openingHoursSpecification with special hours for holidays.

Retail businesses — LocalBusiness + Product + Offer + AggregateRating. Product schema becomes essential for surfacing specific inventory in search results.

Healthcare providers — MedicalBusiness or subtype + MedicalService + Physician + FAQ. Healthcare schema has additional considerations around accuracy and compliance.

Validating Schema Markup

Implementing schema is only useful if it’s implemented correctly. Errors in the markup — missing required fields, incorrect formatting, or unsupported combinations — can prevent rich results from appearing or even cause search engines to ignore the markup entirely.

Google’s Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results) is the primary validation tool. It shows exactly which rich result types a page is eligible for, highlights any errors or warnings, and previews how the rich results will appear.

Schema.org’s Markup Validator (validator.schema.org) checks that markup follows the Schema.org specification correctly, catching structural issues that the Rich Results Test might not flag.

A common practice among Houston businesses with active schema implementations is to revalidate after any website update that touches page templates, content management system versions, or hosting configurations. Schema can break silently — everything looks fine on the page, but the structured data has stopped working.

Schema Markup and AI Search

There’s an increasingly important connection between schema markup and the AI-powered search experiences that are reshaping online visibility.

AI search engines — ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity — rely on structured data to understand and categorize web content. When these systems generate answers to user questions, they draw on the same schema markup that traditional search engines use.

Businesses that implement comprehensive, accurate schema markup are essentially making their content easier for AI systems to parse, understand, and cite. A business with well-structured FAQ schema, clear Service schema, and accurate LocalBusiness information provides AI engines with ready-made, machine-readable content to reference.

This connection means that schema markup investment serves dual purposes: improving visibility in traditional search results through rich snippets, and improving the likelihood of being cited in AI-generated answers. As AI search grows, this dual benefit becomes increasingly valuable.

Common Implementation Mistakes

Several recurring issues tend to undermine schema markup effectiveness for local businesses:

Inconsistent business information. The name, address, and phone number in schema markup must match exactly what appears on the website, on Google Business Profile, and across all online directories. Even small discrepancies — “St.” vs. “Street,” for example — can cause search engines to treat the data as uncertain.

Marking up content that doesn’t exist on the page. Google requires that schema markup reflect content that’s actually visible on the page. Adding schema for reviews that don’t appear on the page, or for services that aren’t described on the page, violates Google’s guidelines and can result in penalties.

Implementing and forgetting. Schema needs to be maintained alongside the business information it describes. When business hours change, when new services are added, when a phone number updates — the schema needs to update too.

Over-marking. Not every page needs every type of schema. The homepage might carry LocalBusiness and Organization schema. Individual service pages carry Service schema. The contact page might carry ContactPoint schema. Applying irrelevant schema types to pages where they don’t apply can confuse search engines rather than help them.

Getting Started

For Houston businesses considering schema markup implementation, the typical progression looks something like this:

Audit current schema — Use Google’s Rich Results Test to check what schema, if any, already exists on the site.
Start with LocalBusiness — The foundational schema type that applies to virtually every local business.
Add Service schema — Mark up each distinct service the business offers.
Implement FAQ schema — Identify the most common customer questions and add FAQ markup to relevant pages.
Add AggregateRating — If the business has a genuine review profile, mark it up with rating schema.
Validate everything — Run each page through both Google’s Rich Results Test and Schema.org’s validator.
Monitor results — Google Search Console’s Enhancements section shows which rich result types are being recognized and any issues that arise.

Schema markup is one of those technical SEO elements that tends to provide disproportionate returns relative to the effort involved. The implementation itself is relatively straightforward — particularly for businesses working with a web developer — and the visibility improvements in search results can be significant and lasting.

For Houston businesses competing in local search, where every click matters and search result real estate is limited, the enhanced listings that schema enables often represent one of the most practical paths to improved search visibility.