Schema markup for small businesses: the 5 types that matter in 2026

Schema markup is a block of code that tells search engines and AI assistants, in plain labels, what your page is about: this is a dental clinic, this is its address, these are its opening hours, this is the price of a service. Visitors never see it. Google, Bing, ChatGPT and Perplexity read it. Most small business sites we audit in Melbourne either have none, or have whatever a plugin added by default, which is often wrong. You don’t need dozens of types. Five cover almost everything a local business needs.

Why schema still matters when rich results have shrunk

A few years ago schema was sold as a way to get stars and drop-down FAQs in Google results. Google has since cut most of that back. FAQ rich results are now shown only for well-known government and health sites, HowTo results are gone, and review stars no longer appear for a business marking up reviews of itself.

So why bother? Because the other job of schema never went away. It gives machines facts they don’t have to guess. When an AI assistant is deciding which Melbourne plumber or accountant to mention, it has to be confident about who you are, where you are and what you do. A page that states those facts in a structured, consistent way is easier to trust and easier to quote. That is the core of answer engine optimisation, and schema is one of the cheapest parts of it.

1. LocalBusiness (or a more specific subtype)

This is the one to get right first. It carries your business name, street address, phone number, opening hours, service area and a link to your Google Business Profile or map listing. Use the most specific type that fits: Dentist, AccountingService, Restaurant, HomeAndConstructionBusiness and so on. A generic LocalBusiness is fine if nothing matches.

The common mistake is inconsistency. The address in the schema says Suite 4, the footer says Level 1, and the Google profile has a different phone number. Search engines treat these as separate signals and have to decide which one is true. Copy the details from your Google Business Profile word for word and keep them identical everywhere.

2. Organization and WebSite: tell machines who you are

Organization describes the business as an entity: legal or trading name, logo, founding date if you want it there, and a sameAs list pointing to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and any directory profiles. WebSite describes the site itself and ties it to that organisation.

This is what helps an AI model connect your website, your Google listing and your social accounts into one business rather than four loose mentions. We see many sites where a theme outputs one organisation name and an SEO plugin outputs another, so the page tells Google two different things. Pick one name and make every tool use it.

3. Service or Product, with prices where you can

If you sell services, mark up each main service page with Service: what it is, who provides it, the area served and, if you publish one, a price or price range through an Offer. Retail sites use Product with Offer, price, currency and availability, which is also what Google Shopping and product rich results rely on.

Prices matter more than most owners expect. People ask assistants questions like “how much does a website cost in Melbourne” or “cheap skin clinic near Richmond”, and a page with a stated price gives the model something concrete to cite. If your price depends on the job, a “from” price is still better than nothing.

4. FAQPage: no longer about rich results

Most businesses will not get FAQ drop-downs in Google any more. Keep the markup anyway, on pages where the questions and answers are visible on the page. Question and answer pairs are the format AI assistants reuse most directly, and marking them up removes any doubt about where each answer starts and ends.

Two rules. The schema text must match what visitors can read on the page, and the questions should be ones customers actually ask you, in their words. “Do you bulk bill?” beats “What is our billing philosophy?” every time. If you want to see how this fits with the rest of an AI-ready page, our llms.txt guide covers the file that sits alongside it.

5. BreadcrumbList: small, easy, often missing

Breadcrumb markup describes where a page sits in your site: Home, then Services, then Teeth Whitening. Google still shows breadcrumbs in results in place of the raw URL, and they help crawlers understand how your pages relate. Most SEO plugins can output it with one setting. It takes five minutes and it is missing on a surprising number of sites.

Article markup for blog posts is worth adding too, mainly for the author, date and publisher details. It is less important for a local business than the four types above.

How to check what your site has now

Paste a page into Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator. You will see which types are present and any errors. Then check three things by hand: the business name, address and phone match your Google Business Profile; there is only one Organization and one LocalBusiness block per page, not two competing ones from different plugins; and the FAQ answers in the code match the text on the page.

If the results are a mess, it is usually fixable without rebuilding the site. This is part of what we do in AI SEO in Melbourne and in ChatGPT optimisation work, and it is built in from the start on our bilingual web design projects, where English and Chinese pages each need their own correct markup. You can also contact us and we will look at a page for you, or read how an AEO agency in Melbourne approaches the rest of the job.

Frequently asked questions