Structured data for local business pages
How to add structured data to a local business page so AI engines can read your name, location, hours, and services, and how to check whether it is present and correct.
Ask an assistant "who does emergency plumbing near me" and watch what it does. It does not read your homepage hero. It reaches for the page that states a name, an address, hours, and a service area in terms a machine can lift without guessing.
If your local business page leaves any of those for a human to infer from layout, the machine infers nothing and moves to the competitor who labeled them.
What this guide does
It walks you through putting structured data on a local business page so an engine can read who you are, where you operate, and what you do. The goal is a page that answers the basic local questions in machine-readable form, not a page that merely looks complete to a person.
Do the visible page first
Structured data describes what is on the page. So the page has to say it.
Open your location page and check that the plain text states, in words: the business name, the full street address, the phone number, the hours, and the area you serve. If a fact is only in an image or a map embed, a machine may never read it.
This step feels too obvious to bother with. It is the one most pages skip, and it is the reason their markup later describes facts the page does not actually contain.
Pick the type that fits your trade
Use the LocalBusiness type, or the subtype closest to what you do: Dentist, Attorney, HomeAndConstructionBusiness, Restaurant, and so on.
The narrower the type, the less an engine has to infer. "LocalBusiness" tells a machine you are a place with hours. "Dentist" tells it the category of question you can answer. Specificity is a gift to the reader, and the reader is a machine.
Fill the fields that match real questions
A local schema block can hold dozens of fields. You do not need all of them. You need the ones people actually ask an assistant about.
- name, address, and geo so it knows where you are
- telephone so it can hand someone a way to reach you
- openingHours so "are they open now" has an answer
- areaServed so "do they cover my town" has an answer
- priceRange and a link to your services so the next question has somewhere to go
Label those well and you have covered the questions that send local intent to a recommendation. The rest is decoration.
Old way versus new way
The old way treated a location page as a human destination: a nice map, a photo of the storefront, a contact form. Good enough for someone who already found you.
The new way treats it as a record a machine reads to answer on your behalf. Same page, higher bar. The map photo helps the human and tells the machine nothing. The labeled address tells the machine everything and costs the human nothing.
Those are different jobs, and a page can do the first one beautifully while failing the second one silently.
The damaging admission
Structured data does not make you the answer. It makes you legible.
If three plumbers in your town all carry clean LocalBusiness markup, the engine still picks among you on signals you do not fully control: reviews, proximity, how the question was phrased, what each engine trusts that week. Schema gets you into the room. It does not promise you walk out with the job.
And if you run a single-location shop with a one-page site and a steady stream of word-of-mouth, weekly readiness checks across four engines are more than you need. We would rather say that than sell you a habit you will not use.
Applying the fix
On WordPress, once the Citedon plugin is connected, the missing local fields can be applied for you. You see a preview, you approve the change, and it ships into your existing setup. It works alongside Yoast or Rank Math rather than fighting them.
On other platforms, the scan still tells you exactly which fields are missing and which contradict the page. You apply the markup yourself from that list.
Recheck after anything moves
Hours change. You open a second location. A template rebuild drops a field nobody noticed. Each of those can quietly break the agreement between your page and its labels.
That is why this is a recheck habit, not a one-time task. You confirm the markup is present, valid, and still matching the page, then you confirm again after the next edit. See how to keep schema valid after edits for the loop.
Start with what an engine reads today
You cannot fix what you have not measured. Before you add a single field, see what an engine reads off the page right now.
Run a free scan on your location page to see which local facts an engine finds, which are missing, and where the markup and the page disagree. Then read structured data for service pages to do the same for what you sell.