Local SEO

Local Schema

LocalBusiness structured data stating a business's address, hours and contact details.

Local schema is LocalBusiness structured data stating a business's name, address, phone, opening hours and geographic coordinates in machine-readable form. It gives search engines a definitive version of the details they otherwise assemble from directories, and the values must match the Google Business Profile exactly.

Definition

LocalBusiness and its subtypes (Restaurant, Dentist, Plumber) carry address, telephone, openingHoursSpecification, geo and priceRange.

Consistency is the whole point. Local ranking depends on corroboration across sources, so schema that disagrees with the Business Profile or with directory listings weakens rather than strengthens confidence.

Why It Matters

It is the one place a business states its own details unambiguously. Every other source is a third party's copy, and copies drift.

Example

{
  "@type": "Dentist",
  "name": "Example Dental",
  "telephone": "+441234567890",
  "address": {"@type": "PostalAddress", "postalCode": "M1 1AA"}
}

Pick the most specific subtype

LocalBusiness works, but schema.org has hundreds of subtypes — Dentist, Plumber, Restaurant, AutoRepair — and the specific one tells a search engine more than the generic parent.

Two fields repay attention beyond the obvious. openingHoursSpecification supports per-day hours and dated exceptions, so holiday closures can be declared rather than discovered by a customer at a locked door. And geo coordinates disambiguate a location that a postal address alone places imprecisely — which matters for anywhere rural, or in a city where the same street name repeats.

Every value must match the Google Business Profile exactly, punctuation included. Local ranking is built on corroboration across sources, so a schema that disagrees with your own listing weakens both.

How SlapMyWeb checks this

The audit validates the LocalBusiness node and reports missing required fields — address, telephone, opening hours — along with the subtype declared. What it cannot check is whether those values match your Google Business Profile and directory listings, which is where local ranking is actually decided, so consistency remains a manual verification.