Schema markup — the structured data hidden in your site’s HTML that tells search engines exactly what your business is and offers — is one of those topics that gets either over-engineered or completely ignored. There’s no middle.
The over-engineering camp adds 17 schema types to every page and breaks half of them with conflicting properties. The ignoring camp leaves all of it off and wonders why their FAQ section never makes featured snippets.
The right answer in 2026 is short: four schema types, implemented well, on the right pages. That’s it. Everything else is ceremony.
Here’s the working list we ship on every Siite local-SEO engagement, in order of impact.
Why schema matters more in 2026 than 2024
Two things changed.
First, Google AI Overviews. The summary box that increasingly dominates query results pulls heavily from structured data. Pages with clean Service, FAQ and Review schema get cited in AI Overviews far more often than pages without. We’ve measured 3–4× citation rates on accounts after schema was added properly.
Second, the local map pack now reads from schema as a relevance signal alongside GBP signals. Google’s local algorithm in late 2025 started weighting on-page schema more heavily — particularly LocalBusiness and Service schema — for businesses where GBP and on-page categories matched closely.
If you write content and don’t mark it up, you’re publishing the right answer in a format Google can’t read confidently. That’s wasted effort.
The four that matter
1. LocalBusiness (or the trade-specific subtype)
The single most important schema type for any service business. Goes on the homepage and the contact page at minimum.
What to use:
- For HVAC:
HVACBusiness - For plumbers:
Plumber - For roofers:
RoofingContractor - For electricians:
Electrician - Generic fallback:
LocalBusiness
Properties that matter, in order:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Plumber",
"name": "Smith Plumbing & Drain",
"image": "https://yoursite.com/logo.png",
"@id": "https://yoursite.com",
"url": "https://yoursite.com",
"telephone": "+15125550142",
"priceRange": "$$",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "4825 Burnet Rd",
"addressLocality": "Austin",
"addressRegion": "TX",
"postalCode": "78756",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"geo": {
"@type": "GeoCoordinates",
"latitude": 30.3164,
"longitude": -97.7395
},
"areaServed": [
{"@type": "City", "name": "Austin"},
{"@type": "City", "name": "Round Rock"},
{"@type": "City", "name": "Cedar Park"}
],
"openingHoursSpecification": [...],
"sameAs": [
"https://www.facebook.com/your-page",
"https://www.yelp.com/biz/your-page",
"https://g.page/your-business"
]
}The non-obvious property that matters most: sameAs. This is the signal that ties your website to your GBP, your Yelp listing, and your social profiles. Get this right and your local entity becomes unambiguous to Google.
2. Service
Goes on every dedicated service page (/services/water-heater-repair-austin/, etc.). Tells Google specifically what the page is about.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Service",
"serviceType": "Water heater repair",
"provider": {
"@type": "Plumber",
"name": "Smith Plumbing & Drain",
"url": "https://yoursite.com"
},
"areaServed": {
"@type": "City",
"name": "Austin"
},
"offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"priceSpecification": {
"@type": "PriceSpecification",
"minPrice": 285,
"maxPrice": 1850,
"priceCurrency": "USD"
}
}
}The price range matters. AI Overviews surface price-aware results disproportionately — when a homeowner searches “how much does water heater repair cost in Austin”, pages that include a minPrice and maxPrice in schema get cited in the answer. Pages that don’t, don’t.
3. FAQPage
Goes on any page with FAQs. These are the highest-ROI schema implementations for organic traffic capture.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [
{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "How much does a tankless water heater install cost in Austin?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "A standard tankless water heater installation in Austin runs $3,200–$5,800 installed, depending on whether it's gas or electric and whether your home needs a new gas line or electrical panel upgrade. Most installs we do are in the $3,800–$4,400 range."
}
},
...
]
}Two notes:
- Don’t use FAQ schema as a featured-snippet hack. Make sure the FAQs you mark up are visible on the page (Google will discount or penalize hidden FAQ schema) and answer questions a real homeowner would ask.
- Be specific. “How much does plumbing cost?” won’t get featured. “How much does a tankless water heater install cost in Austin in 2026?” will, because it matches a real long-tail query.
4. AggregateRating + Review
Goes on the homepage and high-intent service pages. Pulls your Google review aggregate into search results as gold stars.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Plumber",
"name": "Smith Plumbing & Drain",
"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4.9",
"reviewCount": "412"
},
"review": [
{
"@type": "Review",
"author": {"@type": "Person", "name": "Maria L."},
"datePublished": "2026-03-12",
"reviewBody": "AC died at 11pm in July. They had a tech here in 90 minutes...",
"reviewRating": {
"@type": "Rating",
"ratingValue": "5"
}
}
]
}The rules around this are stricter than they used to be. As of mid-2024, Google requires:
- The reviews must actually be present on the page in HTML
- They must be your business’s reviews, not third-party reviews aggregated from elsewhere
- You can’t fabricate or rotate fake-name reviews
Done right, this puts star ratings in your organic search snippets. CTR lift in the 30–60% range.
The 17 that don’t matter
A non-exhaustive list of schema types we see operators add that produce no measurable ranking or display lift:
Organization (redundant with LocalBusiness), WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList (helpful for navigation but not ranking), Article, BlogPosting, ImageObject, VideoObject (only useful if you have actual video), Event, Place, PostalAddress standalone (already inside LocalBusiness), OpeningHoursSpecification standalone, ContactPoint, Person, Offer standalone, Brand, Product.
Some of these are technically correct but produce no incremental search benefit for service businesses. Others are actively miscued — adding Article schema to a service page tells Google the page is editorial, when you want it categorized as service-providing.
Three to four schema types per page, well-formed, beats fifteen with broken nesting.
How to actually validate
Two tools, free, both essential:
- Google Rich Results Test — paste your page URL or HTML, see exactly which schema types Google detects and which fields are missing. If something’s broken, this is where you’ll see it.
- Schema.org Validator — schema-strict validation. Catches errors the Google tool sometimes misses.
Don’t ship schema you haven’t validated. Half the broken schema we audit was deployed years ago, never tested, and has been silently doing nothing or worse since.
Implementation: where to put it
JSON-LD inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag in the <head> of the page. Don’t use Microdata or RDFa — they’re harder to maintain and Google prefers JSON-LD anyway.
For WordPress sites, we install Yoast or Rank Math and configure the schema modules carefully — both default to over-emitting Article and WebPage, which we strip. For headless / Astro / Next.js sites (like the one Siite runs), we ship per-page schema components with the relevant LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and Review markup hand-written and reviewed.
The math
Across the Siite portfolio, accounts that ship the four-schema package see, on average:
- 18–25% lift in organic CTR within 90 days (driven by stars, prices, FAQ snippets surfacing in results)
- 2–4× citation rate in AI Overviews for queries the page targets
- 0.8–1.5 position lift in map-pack rank in the months following deployment
For a typical Austin trade business earning $200k/year in organic-driven revenue, the structural lift from schema alone is roughly $40k–$60k annualized. From markup that takes a developer one focused day to ship.
If you want us to audit your current schema (or absence thereof) and ship the four-schema package, book a 30-minute call — we’ll send the audit free either way.
Pairs well with: The Austin map pack playbook and Citation cleanup for Texas trades.