Schema markup is one of those technical SEO items that sounds obscure and turns out to be fairly simple. For a San Antonio small business, schema is how you hand Google a clean, machine-readable version of the facts a customer would ask for anyway: who you are, where you work, when you are open, and what you do. Here is what local business schema is, which parts matter, and how to tell whether yours is working.
What schema markup is
Schema markup is structured data you add to a web page to describe what the page is about in a format machines read directly. Schema uses a shared vocabulary published at schema.org, which Google, Bing, and most AI assistants recognize. Instead of making a search engine guess that the line “Open until 6” is your closing time, schema states it as a labeled value.
The recommended format is JSON-LD, a small block of code that sits in the page’s head and is invisible to visitors. Older methods embedded the labels into the visible HTML, which made them fragile every time a designer changed the layout. JSON-LD keeps the data separate from the design, so a redesign does not break it. For example, your address can be marked up once in JSON-LD and left alone through two visual refreshes of the site.
What LocalBusiness schema tells a search engine
LocalBusiness schema is the schema.org type built for a business that serves customers in a specific place. LocalBusiness has more specific subtypes, and picking the right one is the first decision: Restaurant, Bakery, Dentist, Plumber, HVACBusiness, AutoRepair, and HardwareStore are all real types with their own expected properties. A dental practice marked up as Dentist is more precisely described than the same practice marked up as a generic LocalBusiness.
The subtype matters because it sets expectations for the rest of the data. A Restaurant can carry a menu property and a cuisine; a Dentist cannot. Choosing a subtype you do not fit is worse than staying generic, so pick the closest honest match. If your business genuinely does two things, such as a cafe that also roasts and sells beans retail, mark up the primary business and describe the second in your content.
The properties that actually carry weight
A handful of properties do most of the work in local business schema, and the rest are optional detail. Get these right before adding anything exotic:
- name, address, telephone — your NAP, spelled exactly as it appears on your site and your Google Business Profile.
- openingHoursSpecification — days and times in a structured format, including seasonal or holiday variations.
- geo — latitude and longitude, which pin you to a point rather than a text string.
- areaServed — the neighborhoods, cities, or ZIP codes you cover, which matters most for trades with no storefront.
- url and sameAs — your website plus links to your profiles on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, and any trade association.
- priceRange — a simple band, not a price list.
Consistency is the whole point. If your schema says Suite 210 and your Google Business Profile says Ste 210, you have introduced a small conflict for no reason. The sameAs links matter more than they look, because they connect the business on your own site to the same business on platforms a search engine already trusts.
What schema can earn, and what it cannot
Rich results are the enhanced search listings that structured data makes possible: star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, event dates, product prices, and recipe cards. Schema is a requirement for those features, so a page without the right markup is not eligible no matter how good it is. Eligibility, though, is not the same as a guarantee.
Google decides case by case whether to show a rich result, and it changes which types it supports. FAQ rich results, for instance, were widely shown and then heavily reduced. So treat schema as a door you unlock rather than a prize you win. What schema reliably does is remove ambiguity about your facts, which helps in ordinary search, in map results, and increasingly when an AI assistant assembles an answer about businesses in your area.
Reviews: what you may mark up and what you may not
Review markup is the most commonly misused part of local business schema. Google’s guidelines allow you to mark up reviews you collected yourself and display on your own site, and they explicitly forbid marking up reviews copied from third-party platforms as though they were your own. Pasting your Google reviews into your homepage and wrapping them in AggregateRating is a guidelines violation, not a clever shortcut.
The penalty is usually quiet: Google stops trusting the structured data on the site rather than sending a warning. Self-serving review markup, where a business writes its own rating, is also disallowed. First, collect reviews through a real process. Then display them honestly on your site. Only then mark them up. A business with no reviews of its own simply leaves the rating properties out, which costs nothing.
Where the markup goes on a WordPress site
On a WordPress site, local business schema usually comes from one of three places: an SEO plugin, the theme, or a hand-written block in the header. Yoast and Rank Math both generate a LocalBusiness block once you fill in the business details, and for most small businesses that output is enough. Problems start when two sources emit schema at once and contradict each other.
Put the LocalBusiness block on your homepage, where a search engine expects to find the organization behind the site. Then give individual pages the schema that fits them: Service markup on a service page, Article on a blog post, BreadcrumbList on anything nested. In practice, auditing a site means first finding every source of schema and switching off the duplicates. Our WordPress development work usually starts with that cleanup.
How to check that your schema is working
Two free tools answer the question directly. The Rich Results Test shows which rich result types a single URL qualifies for, and the Schema Markup Validator shows every piece of structured data on the page with its errors and warnings. Run your homepage, one service page, and one blog post through both, since different page types carry different markup.
Then check Search Console, which reports structured data issues across the whole site and tells you how many pages are affected. Errors are worth fixing immediately because they disqualify the page; warnings are missing optional properties and can wait. For example, a missing priceRange raises a warning, while a malformed address breaks the block outright. Re-test after any theme or plugin update, because an update is the most common way working schema quietly stops working.
Schema is not a ranking shortcut
Schema markup does not move you up the results by itself, and anyone selling it as a ranking tactic is overselling it. Structured data helps a search engine understand and present what is already on your page. A thin page with perfect markup is still a thin page, and no amount of JSON-LD will fix a site with no content about what you actually do.
Where schema earns its keep is as part of a complete local setup: a claimed and filled-out Google Business Profile, consistent citations, real content about your services and service area, and clean markup tying it together. That full picture is what local SEO work covers. Schema is one layer of it, and it is the cheapest layer to get right because it is a one-time build rather than an ongoing effort.
Want to know what your site is sending right now?
Send us your URL and we will run the structured data on it and tell you what is there, what conflicts, and what is missing. Satxly builds only for San Antonio small businesses, projects run on video calls, and we write back within one business day. Get in touch.
