Local business schema generator

1. Pick the most specific business type that genuinely fits. Every option in the list exists in the schema.org vocabulary.
2. Fill in your name, website, phone and address. Leave the street address blank if customers never visit you.
3. Add the towns you actually serve, comma separated. An entire state helps nobody.
4. List your services one per line — each becomes an entry in an offer catalogue.
5. Set your opening hours. Days marked closed are simply omitted rather than emitted as empty.
6. Copy the whole script tag and paste it into the head of your homepage, then check it with Google's Rich Results Test.

Everything in the markup must also appear as visible text somewhere on your site. Markup that contradicts the page is ignored, and markup describing things not on the page at all is at best pointless.

Structured data tells a search engine, in a format it does not have to guess at, that this page is about a business of this type, at this address, open at these times, offering these services. Without it, the engine infers all of that from your visible text, which it is quite good at and occasionally wrong about.

What it does is remove ambiguity and make certain result features possible. What it does not do is make you rank. Google has been consistent that structured data is not a ranking factor in itself; it helps understanding, and understanding sometimes helps ranking, but nobody has ever moved up the map pack purely by adding markup.

It is also worth knowing what LocalBusiness markup specifically will not get you. It will not produce a star rating in your search result — self-serving review markup, meaning reviews about yourself on your own site, is explicitly disregarded. Any tool promising you stars from markup on your own domain is wrong, and it has been wrong for years.

So the honest case for spending twenty minutes here is: it is cheap, it is unambiguous, it occasionally unlocks a result feature, and it means a search engine never has to guess whether "Boise" on your page is your location or a service area. That is a modest and real benefit.

The schema.org vocabulary has a hierarchy under LocalBusiness — Plumber, Electrician, HairSalon, Restaurant, Dentist and many more. Using the most specific type that genuinely fits is better than using the generic one, because it carries more information.

The critical constraint is that the type must exist. Inventing a plausible-sounding type produces markup that is parsed and then ignored, with no error and no warning. The list in this generator contains only types that are genuinely in the vocabulary, which removes the most common way this goes wrong.

If nothing fits precisely, the honest choice is the nearest real ancestor — HomeAndConstructionBusiness for a trade that has no specific type, ProfessionalService for a service business, Store for retail. A correct general type beats an invented specific one every time.

Most schema examples assume a shop with a front door. A large share of local businesses — trades, mobile services, consultants working from home — have no premises a customer would ever visit, and publishing a home address is both a privacy problem and, on Google Business Profile, a guidelines violation.

The right shape here is to omit the street address entirely and populate the service area instead, naming the towns or suburbs you genuinely cover. This generator omits any field you leave blank rather than emitting it empty, so leaving the street out produces valid markup rather than a broken record.

Name real places, and not too many. A list of five towns you actually travel to is more useful than a claim to cover an entire state, and it matches what a customer is trying to establish when they land on your page.

Everything the markup states should also be visible on the page, in the same form. Structured data is meant to describe your content, not to add claims to it, and Google's guidelines are explicit that markup describing information not visible to users can be disregarded.

The same goes for your Google Business Profile. Name, address and phone should be character-for-character identical across all three — your page, your markup and your profile. "Ste 4" against "Suite 4" is enough to weaken the association a search engine is trying to make.

This is why generating the markup is a good prompt to audit the rest. Most people who do this discover at least one inconsistency they had not noticed — usually a phone number formatted three different ways, or an old suite number on one of the three.

Paste the block into the head of your homepage, or anywhere in the body — both are valid, and the head is conventional. Put it on one page only, the page that best represents the business, rather than repeating it site-wide.

Then run the page through Google's Rich Results Test and the schema.org validator. The first tells you what Google can use; the second tells you whether the markup is technically valid. They answer different questions and it is worth doing both.

After that, the only reason to come back is a change to your hours, your services, your address or your phone number. Diarise a look whenever any of those move — stale markup stating hours you no longer keep is worse than no markup, because it is confidently wrong.