What schema should a local service business use?

A local service business should start with one piece of schema markup, the code that labels business facts for search engines, describing the company itself under the LocalBusiness type or the more specific type for its trade. After that, each service page can carry Service markup. Those two cover most of what a home-service site needs. The types come from Schema.org, the shared vocabulary that Google and other search engines read.

Pick the most specific business type

A label that names your trade tells a machine more than a general one. Each of these is a real Schema.org type and a more specific kind of LocalBusiness:

A company that does both plumbing and heating should choose the trade that brings most of its work, the same way it chooses a primary category on its Google Business Profile, and describe the rest through its services.

What the business block should say

Stick to the facts a customer can see on the site, and add nothing. At a minimum:

• The business name, written exactly as on your Google Business Profile.
• Phone number and website address.
• Opening hours.
• The cities or areas you serve.
• A logo or photo.
• Links to your profiles on other sites, which help a machine confirm they all belong to one company.

The address needs a decision. A company with a shop or showroom that customers visit should include it in full. A service-area business that keeps its street address private is an awkward case, because testing tools may flag the address as missing. The markup should say what your site and profile say publicly, so I’d list the city and the areas served and accept the notice.

Put this block in one place, usually the home page, and have other pages refer to it. Slightly different versions on different pages create the kind of conflict the markup exists to remove.

Service markup on service pages

Take a hypothetical HVAC company in El Cajon. Its furnace repair page would say: this is furnace repair, provided by this business, in these cities. Every service page can carry a Service block like that, naming the service, the company that provides it and where it’s offered. As far as Google’s documentation goes, this doesn’t produce a special listing. Its job is to remove doubt about what the page offers. BreadcrumbList markup, which describes where a page sits in the site, is also worth having, since Google can show that trail in a result.

FAQ and review markup

Both are optional, and both are sold harder than they deserve.

FAQPage markup labels questions and answers that are visibly on the page. Google shows FAQ listings for far fewer sites than it once did, and a home-service company shouldn’t expect to get one. The markup does no harm where the questions are real and on the page.

Review markup is the one to be careful with. Google doesn’t show review stars for a business’s own reviews marked up on its own site, so adding it in the hope of stars in the results won’t work. Never mark up reviews or ratings that aren’t shown on the page.

The rules that matter more than the type

Schema must describe what is on the page and must agree with your Google Business Profile. Markup that claims hours, services or ratings the page doesn’t show can be ignored by Google or treated as a violation of its guidelines. Correct markup doesn’t guarantee an enhanced listing or a higher ranking. It does give you a business that machines can identify with confidence, which matters for search and for AI answers alike.

To see what your site has now, start by checking whether your website has schema markup. I plan and test schema markup myself, and it has a role in AI answers through entity and schema work.