Schema markup is a small block of structured information added to a page that states plainly what the page is about. Visitors never see it. Search engines and AI assistants read it first.
Without it, a machine reading your contact page has to work out from the prose that the numbers are a phone number and an address and that the business is a plumber. Usually it gets there. Sometimes it doesn't, and 'usually' is a strange thing to gamble local rankings on.
What it gets you
The visible payoff is rich results: star ratings under a listing, FAQ questions that expand right in the search results, event dates, product availability. Those take up more space and get more clicks.
The less visible payoff matters more now. Schema is how a machine builds a confident picture of your business — what you do, where, for whom, how people rate you. That picture is what gets drawn on when an assistant recommends somebody.
The types most businesses need
LocalBusiness, or a more specific version of it, is the foundation for anyone with a service area. Name, address, phone, hours, service area, price range. Use the most specific type that fits.
Service, one for each thing you offer, tied back to the business. This is what lets a machine understand that you do drain cleaning as a distinct offering rather than as a word that appears on a page.
FAQPage for real questions and answers. This one can show up directly in search results and is heavily quoted by assistants.
Review and AggregateRating for your ratings. Article for blog posts. BreadcrumbList so the path through the website is explicit. Organization on every page to tie it all together.
The rules that keep you out of trouble
Mark up only what's actually on the page. Schema describing reviews that don't appear anywhere, or an FAQ that isn't visible, violates the guidelines and can earn a manual penalty. The markup describes the page; it doesn't replace it.
Keep it consistent with everything else. The name, address, and phone in the schema should match the Google Business Profile and every directory listing exactly.
How to check what you have
Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator both take a URL and show what they can read. Run your home page, a service page, and a blog post. If nothing comes back, you have no schema — which is the most common finding.
Search Console has an enhancements section that reports errors across the whole website once there's markup to report on.
Getting it onto the website
On WordPress the SEO plugins generate a reasonable baseline automatically, and most businesses can get to a good place by filling in the plugin's business settings properly. The gap is usually service-level and FAQ markup, which needs deliberate setup.
The better approach, and how we build, is to generate schema from the website's own content so it can't drift. When a service is added, its markup ships with it. When a review comes in, the rating updates. Markup maintained by hand goes stale the first time someone edits a page and forgets, and stale markup is worse than none.