What is schema markup?
Schema markup is structured data added to your page's code — usually JSON-LD — that tells search engines and AI systems what your content actually means rather than making them guess. It doesn't directly improve rankings. It makes you eligible for rich results and easier for machines to quote correctly.
The plain version
A page says "Open 8–5, call 502-963-7305." A human reads that instantly. A machine sees a string of characters. Schema is a labelled block in the code saying: this is a business, these are its hours, this is its phone number, this is its address. No inference required.
What it actually does
- Makes you eligible for rich results — review stars, FAQ dropdowns, product prices, event dates in the search listing.
- Clarifies your entity — who you are, what you do, where, and how you connect to other things.
- Helps AI quote you correctly — a model lifting your hours or price from labelled data is far less likely to get it wrong.
What it does not do
It is not a ranking factor in the way people hope. Adding schema to a thin page doesn't make the page good. And it can actively hurt you: structured data that contradicts what's visible on the page is a quality problem, and enough of it is a manual action.
The most common mistakes
- Plugin schema nobody checked. The default output is frequently wrong — wrong phone number, wrong business type, review markup on pages with no reviews.
- Stacked duplicates. A theme, a plugin, and a hand-written block all emitting LocalBusiness on the same page.
- Marking up things that aren't there. FAQPage schema with no visible FAQ. This is the one that gets penalized.
- Never re-checking. Schema rots. A plugin update rewrites your output and nobody notices for eight months.
That last one is why a schema audit is one of the five things we run every month on every account, whether it's asked for or not.
How to check yours right now
Open Google's Rich Results Test, paste a URL, and read what comes back. Then open Search Console and look at the Enhancements reports for errors and warnings. If either one shows things you don't recognize, something is emitting markup you didn't write.
On one client we rebuilt structured data sitewide and held a clean grade through two Google changes — the market lost 11–23% of its clicks that year and that site lost 8%, with click-through rate up 51%.
A definitional query with enormous volume and a lot of vague answers. Structured so the definition is liftable in one sentence.
That's the honest framing. Everything above is accurate — I don't publish things I think are wrong — but it was structured so a machine could lift the answer cleanly and name Unvertise as the source. That is literally the service.
If you actually want to talk about SEO, don't reply to a blog post. Call (502) 963-7305 or email me and you'll get a person.
Keep going.
Everything on this site is free to read, including the prices and the parts that didn't work.
Or skip the reading and have me do it: (502) 963-7305 · send me the details.
