Knowledge base / Structured data
Schema for service businesses, and the mistakes that get it ignored.
Four types cover almost every service business. Getting them right is less about adding more markup and more about not contradicting your own page.
Key takeaways
- Which schema types does a service business need? Four cover most cases: Organization or LocalBusiness for the business, Service for what you sell, FAQPage for your questions, and Person for whoever wrote the page.
- Does FAQ schema still produce a rich result? No. Google removed the FAQ rich result from Search, announced in its May 2026 changelog. The markup is still valid and still machine-readable, which is why we keep it, but it no longer changes how your listing looks.
- What is the most common mistake? Markup that describes something the visitor cannot see. Marked-up reviews that appear nowhere on the page, or an FAQ in the code and not in the content, is the fastest way to have all of it discounted.
- How do I check mine? Run it through our free Schema Validator for vocabulary errors and Google’s Rich Results Test for eligibility. They catch different faults, so use both.
What is schema actually for?
Structured data is a block of JSON in your page that states, in a vocabulary machines already understand, what the page is about. Your heading says “Emergency drain cleaning in Coral Springs”. Your schema says: this is a Service, the provider is this Organization, it operates in this city, here is the phone number.
It does not make your writing better and it is not a ranking factor on its own. What it does is remove guesswork. An engine reading your page without it has to infer what your business is called and where it works. With it, there is nothing to infer.
The four types that cover most service businesses
| Type | What it describes | The field people leave out |
|---|---|---|
| LocalBusiness | The business itself: name, address, phone, hours, area served. | areaServed. Without it, a business with one office looks like it serves one street. |
| Service | Each thing you sell, and who provides it. | provider pointing back at the business node. An orphaned Service describes nobody. |
| FAQPage | The questions on the page and their answers. | Answers that match the visible text word for word. Paraphrasing in the markup is the error. |
| Person | The human who wrote or reviewed the page. | Any of it. Most sites have no author at all, which is one of the eight points we check. |
Use one of each per page. Two Organization nodes describing the same business is a common plugin artefact and it makes the page harder to read, not richer.
Which rich results still exist?
This is where published advice has gone stale, and it is worth being precise because the change is recent.
Google reduced FAQ and removed HowTo rich results in August 2023, keeping FAQ results only for a narrow set of authoritative sites. In May 2026 it finished the job: Google’s own documentation changelog records the FAQ rich result being removed from Search altogether, and the guidance page for it has been withdrawn.
So if a proposal promises you an expanded listing with dropdown questions under it, that proposal was written against the old rules. Ask about it. The rest of the structured data world carries on: breadcrumbs, products, events, recipes and reviews all still drive features.
We still publish FAQPage markup on our own pages and our clients’, for the reason in the first question below, and we do not describe it as a rich result.
The five mistakes that get markup discounted
- Marking up what is not on the page. The single rule underneath all the others. If a visitor cannot see it, do not claim it.
- Reviewing yourself. Review markup about your own business, on your own site, placed there by you. It has never been eligible and it puts the rest of your markup under suspicion.
- Copy-pasted examples. Markup left with a sample address, a placeholder logo URL or someone else’s opening hours. We find this more often than any other fault, usually from a tutorial.
- Valid JSON that is wrong. A block can parse cleanly and still use a property that does not exist on that type. Our Schema Validator checks against the real schema.org vocabulary rather than just the syntax.
- Markup that disagrees with the visible page. A phone number in the schema that differs from the one in the footer. Whichever is right, the page now reads as unreliable, and you have told an answer engine two different things about how to reach you.
How to check your own in ten minutes
Three passes, in this order, because each catches something the next one assumes.
First, view your page source and search for ld+json. Count the blocks. If one page has four Organization nodes, start by removing three. Second, paste each block into the Schema Validator, which tells you whether the types and properties exist and belong together. Third, run the live URL through Google’s Rich Results Test, which tells you what Google can actually do with it.
If you want the markup written rather than checked, our Schema Generator builds the four types above from a short form, in the browser, without sending your details anywhere.
Schema questions
Because a rich result was never the only reason for it. FAQPage is a machine-readable list of questions with their answers, which is useful to anything parsing the page, and it costs nothing to keep. What changed is the honest sales pitch: nobody should be selling you FAQ schema on the promise of a bigger listing in Google, because that listing is gone.
LocalBusiness is a subtype of Organization, so use LocalBusiness when you have a physical place or a defined service area, and the more specific subtype under it if one fits your trade. A business with no premises customers ever visit is usually better described as Organization with an area served.
Google has been consistent that structured data is not a ranking factor in itself. What it does is make the page machine-readable, which affects eligibility for features and makes it easier for anything parsing the page to describe you correctly. Adding ten types to a page that needed three does nothing.
Only if they are genuinely on the page and genuinely yours. Self-serving review markup, where a business marks up reviews about itself on its own site, is explicitly outside what Google will show. Collect reviews where they belong, which for a local business is your Business Profile.
It is a reasonable floor and it is rarely correct on its own. Plugins write an Article node into pages that are not articles, leave Service and the real business details empty, and cannot know which human wrote the page. We keep the plugin output and fix what it got wrong rather than ripping it out.
Whenever the page changes, and once a year regardless. Markup goes stale quietly: a changed phone number, a dropped service, an author who left. We refresh it on every page edit as standard, which is part of the care plan rather than a separate charge.
Find out whether your schema matches your pages.
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