Your website says "We offer plumbing services in Peterborough" in a paragraph on your homepage. You know what that means. A human visitor knows what that means. Google has to figure it out from context.
Structured data removes the guesswork. A block of code on your page tells Google: this is a plumbing business, located in Peterborough, serving these postcodes, offering these services, open these hours, reachable at this phone number.
Google reads that code and understands your business in milliseconds. Without it, Google's crawler reads your entire page, interprets the text, and makes assumptions. Those assumptions are often wrong or incomplete.
JSON-LD
The format is called JSON-LD. It sits in a script tag in the head of your page. Visitors do not see it. Search engines read it before they read anything else on the page.
A LocalBusiness schema for a plumber might include the business name, address, phone number, opening hours, service area, and a list of services. Google takes that information and uses it to populate search results, map listings, and knowledge panels.
A Service schema on your boiler repair page tells Google that this specific page describes a specific service, delivered by a specific business, in a specific location. Google can match that page to a search query with higher confidence than a page that mentions boiler repair somewhere in a paragraph.
Rich results
Structured data qualifies your pages for rich results in Google. FAQ schema turns your frequently asked questions into expandable answers directly in the search results. Review schema displays star ratings beneath your listing. Breadcrumb schema shows the navigation path to your page.
A search result with a star rating, FAQ dropdowns, and a clear breadcrumb path gets more clicks than a plain blue link. The content is the same. The presentation is different because structured data gave Google more to work with.
AI search visibility
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude use structured data to understand your business. These AI models pull answers from websites and present them as written responses. Structured data gives them a clear, unambiguous description of your business that raw page text does not.
A site with LocalBusiness schema, Service schema, and FAQ schema gives an AI model everything it needs to recommend your business in a response. A site without structured data forces the model to interpret paragraphs and hope it gets the details right.
Checking your site
Open your website in Chrome. Right-click, select "View Page Source," and search for "application/ld+json". If you find results, you have some structured data. If the search returns nothing, your site has none.
Google provides a free testing tool at Rich Results Test. Paste your URL and see what Google can read. The test shows which schemas are present, whether they are valid, and what rich results your page qualifies for.
What we build
We add JSON-LD structured data to every page on every site we build.
On the homepage: LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService schema with the business name, address, contact details, opening hours, and service area.
On service pages: Service schema describing the specific service, linked to the parent business.
On every page: BreadcrumbList schema showing the navigation hierarchy. This helps both Google and AI search engines understand the structure of your site.
On contact pages: FAQPage schema for frequently asked questions, qualifying those answers for rich results in Google.
The data is validated against Google's testing tools before launch. We check it renders correctly in search results and that AI crawlers can parse it without errors.