Local SEO Schema: A Quick Guide To Rich Results & Local Markup in 2022

• By Debora John
• 20-07-2022
• SEO

Local SEO refers to website optimization to boost leads, brand awareness, and traffic from local searches. Some tasks crucial for local site optimization are: doing SEO of your GMB profile, gathering local keywords, and developing “NAP” citations.

A lot of local sites usually have some fundamental structured data allowed. But, try to appropriately implement explicit and elaborate structured data. Need some suggestions on how to do that? Stay along as we will recommend some easy steps for you to properly implement structured data.

Local Schema Markup: What is it?
Let's discuss what schema markup and structured data are before getting into the how-to.

A semantic vocabulary of tags or microdata called schema markup is frequently referred to as schema or structured data and is applied to the source code of your website to enhance how search engines understand and display your page in search engine results (SERPs).

In a rare instance of cooperation, Google, Microsoft, Yandex, and Yahoo! formed Schema.org to assist website owners in giving search engines the data they require to comprehend your content and give users the most relevant search results.

What is the Purpose of Schema Markup?
Schema markup, put simply, tells search engines what specific information is present on your site and where it is. Search engines are informed by the back-end code that "This is our location," "This is a recipe," or "This is a video."

This additional data makes it simpler for search engines to crawl, classify, and rank content so they can give users the best search results—after all, that is the basic objective of a search engine.

Pick a Suitable Schema.org Category
Schema.org offers many different schema property categories that are distinctly related to local businesses. Selecting the most pertinent schema category for your local company is crucial. Suppose, your local business is a medical store, then the most suitable category for you will be Medical Store.

Applicable schema categories help search engines better relevantly understands your site. If you aren’t sure about the suitable category for your brand, then you can take the help of an experienced SEO services agency in Dubai.

What to Do If You Can't Find a Suitable Schema Category?
Simply use Local Business as the category if you don't find a relevant schema category for your business. But, if you have the technical know-how, then you can recommend a new schema category on the schema’s Github forum.

The platform’s developers answer detailed suggestions on their forum. Occasionally, they make new schema properties based on these suggestions.

Schema Properties to Implement
The next step is making sure that your schema validates. To do this, you should have some sub-properties of schema.org.

Errors can lead to disqualification from getting rich results. These schema properties are needed for confirmation:

Name: Name of your company/store
URL: The URL of the related landing page
Telephone: Your business contact number
Opening Hours: Your business’s opening and closing timings
Logo: URL of your brand/shop’s logo image
Image: Use any related picture on your landing page for this purpose. It's best if you use a shopfront picture if you have one.
Geo: This refers to the geo-coordinates of the brand/store location
Address: The shop’s address which must be present on the landing page.
Main Content Of Page: The body content of the landing page
Area Served: We suggest that you place a zipcode for this property

Recommended and Widely Used Schema Properties
Here are the schema properties that are commonly used and beneficial for local businesses. If you are a digital marketing agency, we recommend using them for your clients having local businesses.

Aggregate Rating: It tells search engines about the overall rating depending upon several ratings/reviews. Check out Google’s guidelines on this

Review: A review of your store/brand

Alternate Name: Stores or companies usually have two or more names like Acme Inc. versus Acme Stores. This property marks up other common business name variations involving abbreviations

FAQ Page: Add this special property if your business site has a FAQ page. Don't forget to stick to Google’s guidelines

Same As: This property refers to external sites that are relevant to your site’s identity. For example YouTube channel pages, Facebook pages, and Wikipedia pages

Breadcrumb: This property puts up the current breadcrumb navigation order on the site. We strongly suggest it as it normally shows on the search engine result pages as a rich result

Has Mapp: A link to your local store’s map

Price Range: Your brand/shop’s price range

Department: chain stores sometimes have internal departments like the grocery departments inside a pharmacy. This specialty property aims to put up these department stores

Some Advanced Schema Properties
Here are some advanced types of schema:
Sitelinks Search Box: We have to open a website if we want to search for something inside it by using the internal search bar. This specialty schema allows users to search internally on a website quickly using Google’s SERPs. And they are saved from having to visit your site directly

Additional Type: It aids Google in figuring out what your business is locally relevant to. For instance, you can put Wikipedia categories in the values of this schema. Suppose your shop or company sells fitness equipment. Then you can have the additional type schema as fitness gear.

Ensuring the Validation of Your Structured Data
Now the question arises how one can confirm that their structured data is fully validated? This is important because invalid structured data will reduce the chances of your landing page being selected for rich results.

Google crawler finds it difficult or impossible to show your rich result in Google search as a rich result if there are errors in them. You can use 2 unique software to ensure that your property is suitably validated. These are Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator. Google also offers enhancement reports on the errors found in your structured data.

Bottom Line
We hope that now you have gotten a better command of using schema markup for local SEO. Applying schema for a page’s content is a great local SEO practice. It allows businesses to obtain higher rankings in the search results.