DefinedTerm · Glossary
What is LocalBusiness schema
LocalBusiness schema is a structured-data vocabulary from Schema.org that lets businesses embed machine-readable facts — name, address, telephone, opening hours, geo-coordinates, service areas, price range, and aggregate ratings — directly inside a webpage's HTML as JSON-LD. Search engines and AI assistants consume this markup to populate Knowledge Panels, Local Packs, and AI-generated answers without scraping prose. For tradesmen and home-services firms, correct LocalBusiness markup is the single highest-leverage technical action for visibility in both traditional local search and AI-powered discovery in 2026.
Full definition
LocalBusiness is a type defined in the Schema.org vocabulary — the shared ontology maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex since 2011. It extends the Organization type and adds properties specific to physical or service-area businesses: address (using PostalAddress), geo (latitude/longitude), openingHoursSpecification, telephone, priceRange, aggregateRating, areaServed, and hasMap, among others.
The markup is almost universally deployed as JSON-LD: a <script type="application/ld+json"> block placed in the <head> of a webpage. The block does not affect the visual page but gives crawlers a clean, structured extract of the entity's facts.
Specialist subtypes extend LocalBusiness further. Plumber, Electrician, HVACBusiness, RoofingContractor, GeneralContractor, and HomeAndConstructionBusiness are all first-class types in Schema.org. Using the most specific applicable type signals industry relevance and improves category matching in Knowledge Panels.
Why it matters in 2026
AI assistants — including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot — increasingly answer queries such as "best plumber near me" or "electrician open now in Bristol" by reading structured data rather than parsing prose. Businesses with complete, error-free LocalBusiness JSON-LD are consistently better represented in AI-generated local answers than those relying on unstructured content alone.
Google's local-ranking algorithm weighs Proximity, Prominence, and Relevance. Structured signals feed all three factors. Incorrect or missing addressLocality, addressRegion, or areaServed values are among the leading causes of suppressed local-pack eligibility identified in Google Search Console structured-data reports.
How it works
A minimal but valid LocalBusiness block for a UK plumbing firm looks like this:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Plumber",
"name": "Rapid Flow Plumbing Ltd",
"telephone": "+44-1234-567890",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "12 Trade Park Lane",
"addressLocality": "Bristol",
"addressRegion": "England",
"postalCode": "BS1 4AA",
"addressCountry": "GB"
},
"geo": {
"@type": "GeoCoordinates",
"latitude": 51.4545,
"longitude": -2.5879
},
"openingHoursSpecification": [
{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
"opens": "08:00",
"closes": "18:00"
}
],
"priceRange": "££",
"areaServed": "Bristol",
"sameAs": ["https://www.google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJExample"]
}
Recommended validators before deploying: Google Rich Results Test at search.google.com/test/rich-results and Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org. Both flag required-field omissions and type mismatches.
Difference from plain NAP citations
| Signal | LocalBusiness JSON-LD | NAP citation (directory listing) |
|---|---|---|
| Machine-readability | Fully structured, typed | Unstructured prose or HTML |
| Crawl reliability | Parsed directly, no ambiguity | Dependent on crawler heuristics |
| Rich result eligibility | Yes (Knowledge Panel, Local Pack) | No |
| AI answer sourcing | Primary signal | Secondary or ignored |
| Update latency | Instant on re-crawl | Days to weeks via third-party propagation |
| Maintenance | Single page update | Requires updating each directory separately |
Related terms
JSON-LD, sameAs, E-E-A-T.
Fuentes
Términos relacionados
- json-ld
- sameas
- e-e-a-t