Structured Data for Local Business: A Plain-English Guide

JSON-LD is the structured data format AI engines actually read — and most local business websites don't have it at all. Here's what it is, which schema types matter, and how to verify it's working.

What Structured Data Actually Does

Your website contains information about your business. But to a machine — whether that's a search engine crawler or an AI language model — unstructured text is expensive to interpret. "We're a full-service digital marketing agency located in Murray, Kentucky" is understandable to a human. A machine has to infer from it what type of entity you are, where you're located, and what category you belong to.

Structured data in JSON-LD format eliminates that inference requirement. It's a block of code on your webpage that says, in a standardized machine-readable format: this entity is of type LocalBusiness, its name is this, its address is this, its service category is this. The machine doesn't have to guess. You're telling it directly.

JSON-LD stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data. It lives in a script tag in your page's HTML. You don't see it when you visit the site — it's metadata that machines read. It's the format that both Google and AI engines prefer over alternatives like Microdata or RDFa.

The 5 Schema Types Every Local Business Needs

1. LocalBusiness (or a specific subtype)
The foundational entity declaration. At minimum it should include: name, address (with full PostalAddress), telephone, url, openingHours, and priceRange if applicable. For industry-specific businesses, use a more specific subtype — schema.org has over 100 LocalBusiness subtypes including AccountingService, LegalService, MedicalBusiness, and more. The more specific your type declaration, the stronger the entity signal.

2. Organization
Where LocalBusiness declares your physical presence, Organization declares your corporate identity. Include: legalName, foundingDate, description, and sameAs links pointing to your social profiles and directory listings. The sameAs property is particularly important for AEO — it explicitly connects your entity across platforms, which is exactly what AI engines need to build a coherent entity representation.

3. FAQPage
FAQPage schema marks up question-and-answer content in a format trivially easy for AI systems to retrieve. Each question becomes a Question entity with an acceptedAnswer. This schema type has an outsized impact on AI citation because it directly mirrors the conversational query format that AI engines process. If you have five frequently asked questions on your site, marking them up with FAQPage schema takes about 20 minutes and meaningfully improves your retrievability for those query types.

4. Service
If you offer distinct services, each one should have its own Service schema block. Include: name, description, provider (linking back to your Organization), areaServed, and serviceType. This gives AI engines the ability to match your entity to service-specific queries — "who does AEO consulting in Kentucky" requires the AI to know that AEO consulting is a service you provide, not just that you exist.

5. Person
For any business where individual expertise is part of the value proposition, Person schema for key team members matters. Include: name, jobTitle, worksFor, and knowsAbout. This builds E-E-A-T signals into your entity structure. AI engines weigh expert attribution when making recommendations in advisory or professional service categories.

How to Verify It's Working

Two tools: Google's Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results) validates that your JSON-LD is syntactically correct and recognized by Google's parser. Schema.org's own validator confirms conformance to the schema specification. Run both after implementation. The most common errors: missing required properties, malformed JSON (an unclosed bracket), or using a property that doesn't apply to your schema type.

After validation, check Google Search Console's "Enhancements" section within a few weeks — it will show detected structured data and flag any issues Google found in the wild. For AEO validation specifically, re-run your citeddigital.com/aeo score after implementation to see the impact on your structured data dimension.