Your website has two audiences. People read the words and look at the photos. Search engines, and now AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, read your pages too, and they work best when the facts are spelled out clearly.
Structured data, often called schema, is how you spell them out. It is a short block of code that visitors never see. In a standard format, it says: this is a business, here is its address, these are its services, this is the question on the page and this is the answer.
What structured data can say about a business
- Who you are: your business name, logo, address, phone number and the areas you serve.
- What you offer: your services, and your prices if you publish them.
- How pages fit together: which business a page belongs to, who wrote an article and where a page sits on the site.
- Questions and answers: the questions customers ask, matched to the answers on the page.
The one rule: it must match the page
Structured data should describe what visitors can already see. If the code says one price and the page says another, or it mentions reviews that are not on the page, search engines can ignore it or treat it as spam. So we build it from the same information that builds the page. When a price or a service changes, the page and the structured data change together.
Connected, not scattered
Each piece links to the others: the business, its website, its pages, its services and the person behind it. A connected picture like this is easier for search engines and AI tools to make sense of than lots of separate fragments.
Test it, then keep it current
We test the code with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator, and fix what they flag. Search features also change over time. Google now shows FAQ results for far fewer sites, and it has retired the sitelinks search box, for example. So we focus on keeping the markup accurate rather than chasing every feature.
A plain summary for AI tools: llms.txt
We also publish an llms.txt file where it helps. It is a short text summary of the business and its most useful pages, written for AI tools. It is a new and informal idea, not a standard that any search engine has promised to use, so we treat it as a helpful extra rather than a shortcut. You can read ours at /llms.txt.
What it can and cannot do
Structured data helps search engines understand your business accurately, and it can make a page eligible for richer search listings. It does not guarantee those listings, and it does not guarantee rankings. Nobody can honestly promise either. What it does is remove guesswork, so the right facts are easy to find.
Structured data comes as standard on every website we build. See our local SEO services, or check your own site with our local SEO checklist.
