Structured data (schema): how to stand out on Google with rich results

When you search Google for a recipe, a product or an event, some results show stars, price, availability, dates or a navigation path above the title. That is no coincidence, nor a privilege reserved for big brands: those rich results come, to a large extent, from the structured data a website hands to Google in its code.

In this guide I explain what structured data is, which format to use, which schema types make sense for a small business, which rules you must respect to stay out of trouble (especially with reviews), what happened to FAQ and how-to results, and how to check that everything works. I rely on Google Search Central's official documentation, which is what counts here, not on tricks that circulate on forums.

Structured data is a standardised way of describing a page's content so that machines understand it without having to interpret it. A person sees your business name, address, phone and opening hours on your website and gets it instantly. A search engine sees text. With structured data you tell it explicitly: this is a local business, this is its name, this is its address and these are its opening hours.

The vocabulary used is schema.org, a project jointly created by the major search engines that defines types (local business, product, event, article, organization…) and their properties. Google uses part of that vocabulary to generate rich results, and its introduction to structured data explains which types it supports and what each one requires.

There are three ways to add structured data to a page: JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa. All three are valid, but Google recommends JSON-LD because it is the easiest to implement and maintain at scale, and it is the option I use in all my projects today.

The advantage of JSON-LD is that it is separate from the design. Instead of mixing attributes into the visible HTML, you add a block of code (a script of type application/ld+json) in the head or body of the page with all the information described in JSON: the context (schema.org), the entity type and its properties. If you change the website's design tomorrow, the structured data does not break.

There is one golden rule you must not forget: what you mark up has to be visible to the user on the page itself. If the structured data says a product costs one thing and the page shows another, or describes reviews nobody can read, you are breaking the guidelines and risk losing rich results or even getting a manual action.

Google's gallery includes dozens of types, from recipes to job postings. For most small businesses, these are the ones that really make a difference:

LocalBusiness: essential for businesses with premises

It describes your business: name, address, phone, opening hours, coordinates, website and, where relevant, price range. Use the most specific subtype available (Dentist, Restaurant, HairSalon, LegalService…) rather than the generic one. It does not replace your Google listing, but it reinforces the consistency of your data; if you work on local SEO, it complements what I cover in how to optimise your Google Business Profile.

Organization: who is behind the website

It states the company's official name, logo, contact details and official profiles on other platforms. It helps Google identify your brand as a specific entity and show the correct logo. It usually goes on the home page or the about page.

Product: a must if you sell online

It lets you show price, availability, ratings and other product details directly in the results. Google distinguishes between product snippets (pages that talk about products) and merchant listings (pages where you can buy), with slightly different requirements. In a well-built online store, this markup is generated automatically from the catalogue; I go into more detail in the article on SEO for online stores.

Review and AggregateRating: the stars, with their rules

Stars are the most coveted rich result and also the most misused. Google's guidelines are clear: if a business controls the reviews about itself, its pages using LocalBusiness or Organization are not eligible to show stars, even if those reviews come through a third-party widget. Google calls these self-serving reviews. Ratings must also come directly from users and be visible on the page.

Where marking up reviews does make sense is on product pages with genuine buyer reviews, or on websites that review third-party things. For your local business, the reviews that count are the ones on your Google listing, and that is where the effort is worth putting in.

Event: workshops, courses and dated activities

If you run events (in person, online or mixed), Event markup lets them appear in Google's event experiences with date, venue and link. Be careful: it has to be a real event with a specific date. Google does not allow you to mark up a promotion, a coupon or a service available on any day as an event.

BreadcrumbList: the navigation path

It indicates where each page sits within the site structure (Home › Services › Web design), and Google can show that path instead of the URL. Its documentation states that this feature is available in desktop results. It is easy to implement and especially useful for stores and websites with many sections.

For years, marking up frequently asked questions (FAQPage) was the favourite trick to take up more space on Google: expandable questions appeared below the result. In August 2023 Google announced a major cut: step-by-step how-to results (HowTo) stopped being shown, first on mobile and then on desktop too, and FAQ results were limited to well-known, authoritative government and health websites.

The story did not end there. According to Google Search Central's documentation, since 7 May 2026 FAQ rich results no longer appear in Google Search for any website, and the documentation for that type was withdrawn shortly afterwards. If someone is selling you FAQ markup today as a way to gain space on Google, they are out of date.

Does that mean you should delete the FAQ sections on your website? Not at all. A good FAQ section answers real questions, reduces repeated enquiries and provides useful content that both Google and AI assistants can draw on. What no longer makes sense is creating them just to win a rich result. I talk about how AI search engines read you in the article on GEO and AI search visibility; here I stick to what Google shows in its results.

Implementing schema without checking it is like sending a form without seeing whether it arrives. These are the official tools and the order in which I use them:

1. 1Google's [Rich Results Test](https://search.google.com/test/rich-results): paste a URL or a code snippet and it tells you which rich results the page can generate, with errors and warnings. This is the test that matters for Google.
2. 2Schema.org validator (validator.schema.org): checks that the markup is correct against the full schema.org vocabulary, including types Google does not use for rich results.
3. 3Search Console reports: in the enhancements section you will see each type of structured data detected on your site, how many pages are valid and which ones have issues. It is the way to keep an eye on it over time.
4. 4URL Inspection in Search Console: after fixing something, you can check the live version and request that Google recrawl the page.

Be patient: even if the markup is perfect, Google may take a while to recrawl pages, and it decides on its own when to show a rich result depending on the query, the device and the overall quality of the site.

• Marking up content that is not visible: opening hours, prices or reviews that only exist in the code.
• Stars on the home page of a business with its own reviews, which the guidelines consider self-serving.
• Outdated data: the opening hours changed on the website but not in the JSON-LD, or an out-of-stock product is still marked as available.
• Duplicate or conflicting markup: two plugins generating the same type with different data on the same page.
• Generic types when a specific one exists, or missing required properties.
• Marking up a promotion as an event, or sales copy nobody has asked about as an FAQ.
• Copying markup from another website without changing the name, URL or phone number. It happens more than you would think.

In WordPress, the best-known SEO plugins automatically generate basic organization, article and breadcrumb markup, and WooCommerce adds product markup. It is a good starting point, but it is worth reviewing: you often need to complete the business type, opening hours or address, and stop two plugins from marking up the same thing.

On a custom website built with Next.js, the markup is generated from the same data that feeds the page: the product price, the opening hours or the event date come from a single source, so they cannot contradict each other. It is one of the advantages of web development planned for SEO from the start, rather than adding patches at the end.

In both cases the key is the same: decide which types make sense for your business, mark them up properly once and monitor in Search Console that they stay valid as the website changes.

Structured data is not magic or a shortcut to higher rankings, but it is one of the technical improvements with the best effort-to-benefit ratio. Within a well-planned SEO strategy, the basics for a small business are LocalBusiness or Organization, Product if you sell online, BreadcrumbList to organise the site and Event if you run activities. Respect the review rules, forget the FAQ tricks that no longer work and always check with the official tools.

I'm Elmar Mamedova, a full stack developer based in Málaga, and in every website I build schema is part of the technical foundation, not an item on a list of extras. If you want to know whether your website is telling Google clearly who you are, I can review your current markup and tell you what is missing, what is superfluous and what to fix first.