What is LocalBusiness structured data, and how do you add it?

What is LocalBusiness structured data?

LocalBusiness structured data describes a particular physical business or a branch of an organization. For example, it can represent a restaurant, a specific branch of a restaurant chain, a bank branch, a medical practice, or a club. Structured data is a standardized format used to provide information about a page and classify its content, such as ingredients and cooking time on a recipe page.

By using LocalBusiness structured data, you can tell Google about various aspects of your business, including its operating hours, different departments within the organization, and accepted payment methods. You can also specify the business's price range, for example, using symbols like "$$$". Google uses this structured data to understand the content of the page and to gather information about the web and the world in general.

What are rich results, and how does LocalBusiness structured data help?

Rich results are search results that are more engaging to users, encouraging them to interact more with your website. Google uses structured data found on the web to understand the content of a page, which can then enable these enhanced displays in search results.

To be eligible for appearance in LocalBusiness rich results, you must follow specific guidelines. This includes specifying all required properties listed in the documentation for the LocalBusiness rich result type. Including these necessary properties makes your content eligible for display with an enhanced appearance in Google Search.

How do you add LocalBusiness structured data to your page?

Structured data is coded using in-page markup on the page to which the information applies. Google recommends using JSON-LD as the format that is generally easiest to implement and maintain. However, all three supported formats, JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa, are equally acceptable to Google, provided the markup is valid and properly implemented according to the feature's documentation.

It is important that your structured data is a true representation of the page content and that the marked-up content is visible to readers of the page. Do not mark up information that is not visible to the user, even if it is accurate. Additionally, you should not create blank or empty pages solely to hold structured data.

What information should you include in LocalBusiness structured data?

To be eligible for display as a rich result, you must include the required properties for your content. Google documents that you must specify all required properties listed in the documentation for your specific rich result type. This ensures that the object is eligible for appearance in Google Search with an enhanced display.

LocalBusiness structured data allows you to provide details such as business hours, accepted payment methods, and the price range of the business. You can also include information about different departments within a business and reviews, if your site captures reviews about other businesses.

How do you validate LocalBusiness structured data?

After adding structured data, you should validate your code using Google's Rich Results Test. This tool is easy and useful for validating your structured data and can help you preview how a feature might appear in Google Search. You must fix any critical errors identified by the test.

You can also use the URL Inspection tool to test how Google sees the page. It is recommended to deploy a few pages that include your structured data and then use this tool. Both the Rich Results Test and the URL Inspection tool catch most technical errors and help ensure compliance with technical guidelines.

What are Google's guidelines for LocalBusiness structured data?

To be eligible for rich result appearance in Google Search results, structured data must not violate Google's Content policies for Google Search, which include their spam policies. Your structured data must be a true representation of the page content, and you should not mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page. Furthermore, do not create blank or empty pages just to hold structured data.

You must not block your structured data pages to Googlebot using robots.txt, noindex, or any other access control methods. If your page contains a structured data issue, it can result in a manual action. If you receive a structured data manual action against your page, the structured data on that page will be ignored, although the page can still appear in Google Search results.

Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if your page is marked up correctly according to the Rich Results Test. Eligibility for rich results depends on various factors beyond just correct implementation.

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