What is local business schema and does your website need it?
Structured data that tells search engines and AI exactly who and where you are.
LocalBusiness schema is structured data that states your name, address, phone, hours, and location in a form search engines and AI answer engines can read without guessing, and yes, a local business site should have it. It is cheap to add and it removes ambiguity.
What to include
Google's structured data documentation lists name and address as the required properties for local business markup, with recommended properties including telephone, url, geo coordinates, openingHoursSpecification, priceRange, and aggregateRating. Google documents JSON-LD as the format, placed in a script tag on the page.
- Use the most specific type that fits, such as Dentist, Plumber, or AutoDealer, rather than the generic LocalBusiness where a subtype exists.
- Make the name, address, and phone in the markup match your Google Business Profile and your site footer exactly. Mismatched schema is worse than no schema.
- Use sameAs to point at your Google Business Profile, your social profiles, and your major directory listings. This is how you connect the identities.
- On a multi location site, put markup for each location on that location's page, not all of them on the homepage.
What it will not do
Google states that it does not guarantee that features consuming structured data will show up in search results, and that valid markup alone does not make a page eligible for rich results. Schema is not a ranking shortcut. It does not fix a thin page, and it does not change your Business Profile. Do not mark up review counts you did not earn, and do not mark up content that is not visible on the page.
Why it matters more now
Answer engines assemble responses from sources they can parse confidently. Structured data is the cleanest statement you can make about who you are and where you operate. When an AI answer needs a local provider, the site that stated its facts unambiguously is easier to cite than the one that buried them in a paragraph.
Related: What is website schema?, Is SEO built into your development?, custom web development.