SHORT ANSWER
A small business should implement four types of schema.org structured data: Organization or LocalBusiness (company identity), Service or Offer (what it sells), FAQPage (frequently asked questions) and BreadcrumbList (page hierarchy). A blog adds the Article type to every post. Structured data is inserted as JSON-LD in the head section and must match the content visible on the page.
- JSON-LD is Google's recommended format for structured data.
- Structured data must match the content visible to the user.
- BreadcrumbList helps display the navigation path in search results.
- FAQPage organizes questions and answers for parsers and language models.
- Inconsistent or fabricated structured data can result in a manual penalty from Google.
Start with your company identity
Organization (or LocalBusiness if you serve customers in a specific location) is the foundation. Name, URL, logo, contact channels, social media profiles. This set tells a machine that all these mentions refer to one entity.
Describe what you sell
Service and Offer describe the service and its terms. For a service business, this is often more important than Product: it lets you state exactly what scope you cover, for whom and under what billing model.
- Service: service name, description, service area, provider.
- Offer: billing model, currency, terms.
- OfferCatalog: several ways to work together in one place.
FAQ and breadcrumbs: low-cost, tangible gains
FAQPage is the simplest way to give machines ready-made question–answer pairs. Important: the content in JSON-LD must exactly match what the user sees, including after switching the site’s language.
BreadcrumbList organizes the hierarchy. For a site with subpages (services, process, pricing, case studies, blog), it signals that the site has a structure rather than being one long landing page.
Most common mistakes
Three mistakes recur almost every time: structured data describing content that is not on the page; English-only JSON-LD on a bilingual site; and several conflicting declarations of the same entity across different subpages.