Your website already says your business name, address, phone number and opening hours. Schema markup says the same things again, in a format built for machines instead of people. That’s all it is. It’s not a ranking trick, and adding it won’t push you up the results by itself.
What it does is remove guesswork. Instead of Google, Bing or an AI assistant working out that “Mon to Fri 7 to 4” in your footer means your opening hours, you tell them directly, in a standard vocabulary every major search engine reads. For a local business with one premises, it takes about half an hour to set up properly, and it’s worth that half hour.
What it looks like
Schema is usually added as a small block of code called JSON-LD, which sits in the page’s HTML and is invisible to visitors. A stripped-back example for a made-up Ballina plumber:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Plumber",
"name": "Example Plumbing",
"url": "https://www.exampleplumbing.com.au/",
"telephone": "+61 2 5550 4321",
"image": "https://www.exampleplumbing.com.au/images/van.jpg",
"priceRange": "$$",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "1 Example Street",
"addressLocality": "Ballina",
"addressRegion": "NSW",
"postalCode": "2478",
"addressCountry": "AU"
},
"geo": {
"@type": "GeoCoordinates",
"latitude": 0,
"longitude": 0
},
"openingHoursSpecification": [{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
"opens": "07:00",
"closes": "16:00"
}],
"sameAs": [
"https://www.facebook.com/exampleplumbing",
"https://www.instagram.com/exampleplumbing"
]
}
The coordinates are zeroed here because it’s a made-up business. Use your real ones, which you can copy from Google Maps by right-clicking your location.
You don’t need to write this by hand on WordPress. Your SEO plugin generates it from settings, which we’ll get to. But it helps to know what each part means, so you can check the output is right.
The properties that matter
Google’s LocalBusiness structured data guide lists only two required properties: the business name and its address. Everything else is recommended. This is how we treat each one on a small business site.
@type. The kind of business. Schema.org has specific types such as Plumber, Electrician, Dentist, Physiotherapy, Restaurant and many more. Pick the most specific one that fits. If nothing fits, LocalBusiness is fine.
name. Your business name exactly as it appears on your Google Business Profile, signage and invoices. Not “Example Plumbing Ballina Best Plumber”. Stuffing keywords into the name here is as unhelpful as it is on your profile.
address. Your full street address with postcode, and “AU” as the country code. If you work from home and hide your address on Google Business Profile, think carefully before publishing it here. Google asks you to include as many address properties as you can, so a home-based business can give the suburb, state and postcode without the street, and describe its service area in the page content.
telephone. Include the country code: +61 followed by the number without its leading zero.
url. The page for this location. For a single-location business, that’s the homepage.
geo. Latitude and longitude. Google asks for at least five decimal places of precision.
openingHoursSpecification. Your regular hours, day by day. Times are in 24-hour format. Google’s guide also explains how to mark a day as closed and how to handle seasonal hours, which is useful if you close over Christmas or run winter hours.
priceRange. Optional, and Google wants it under 100 characters. A dollar-sign range or a plain phrase like “Free quotes” both work. Leave it out if it doesn’t suit your business.
sameAs. Links to your profiles on other sites: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, a trade directory, your industry association listing. Google’s Organization guide describes it as the URL of a page on another website with more information about your organisation. This is the property that ties your scattered online presence together, and it’s the one most often left empty.
Two things to leave out
aggregateRating and review for your own business. Google’s guidance reserves these for sites that collect reviews about other local businesses. Marking up your own testimonials to try for review stars in results breaks its rules and can lead to a manual action.
Locations you don’t have. If you serve Byron Bay from a Ballina base, you have one address, and that’s the one in the markup. Never invent premises to target a town.
Setting it up in Yoast SEO
On WordPress, Yoast SEO is the plugin we reach for most often, and it splits this job in two.
The free version handles your organisation details. Go to Yoast SEO > Settings > Site representation:
- Choose Organization, not Person. Yoast’s own advice is that local businesses should pick it.
- Fill in the organization name and logo. The logo should be square and at least 112 by 112 pixels.
- Add your profiles under Other profiles. Your Facebook page, Instagram, LinkedIn and any directory or association listing, using Add another profile for each. These feed the sameAs links in your Organization markup.
- Click Save changes.
What the free version doesn’t do is publish your address, phone number, coordinates and opening hours as LocalBusiness markup. For that you need Yoast Local SEO, which at the time of writing comes bundled with Yoast SEO Premium rather than sold on its own. With it installed, you:
- Set the business type to the most specific one available.
- Enter the address, with Australia as the country, and the phone number in international format.
- Add opening hours for each day.
- Check the latitude and longitude match your real location.
If you’d rather not pay for Premium, a developer can add LocalBusiness markup with a small code filter that extends Yoast’s output. Either way, check the result in the Rich Results Test (below).
If your business has more than one premises, each location needs its own page and its own markup with its own address and hours. That’s a bigger job, and one where Yoast Local SEO or a custom set-up earns its keep.
Testing it
Paste your homepage address into Google’s Rich Results Test. It shows which structured data Google detected and flags errors and warnings. Errors need fixing. Warnings are usually missing recommended properties, so fill in what’s true for your business and ignore the rest.
Then compare the markup with your Google Business Profile. Name, address, phone and hours should match exactly. When they disagree, you’re giving search engines two answers and asking them to choose.
Recheck whenever something changes: new hours, a move, a new phone number. It’s easy to update the website footer and the Business Profile and forget the schema, which is precisely the kind of quiet inconsistency that slowly undermines trust in your details.
Is it worth the bother?
Yes, in the way that filling out your Business Profile is worth it. It doesn’t win you rankings on its own, but it removes doubt about who you are, where you are and when you’re open. That matters more now that AI search tools are answering questions like “plumber open Saturday near Ballina”, which we cover in structured data and AI search. It’s also one line on our technical SEO checklist, alongside the other things worth checking.
Set aside half an hour, open your Yoast settings and your Business Profile side by side, and make them agree. Our SEO service can set it up, audit existing markup or handle a multi-location business, and it’s part of the SEO foundations we put on new website builds.