Schema markup is one of those terms that appears in every SEO checklist but rarely gets explained in a way that makes it obvious why you'd bother. Most small business websites don't have it. That was fine as a competitive position a few years ago. It's less fine now.
What it actually is
Your website communicates with visitors through words and images. It communicates with Google through the same words and images, but Google has to read those words and figure out what they mean on its own. Schema markup gives Google a shortcut. It's a set of labels you add to your website's code that say, explicitly: this is a business name, this is a phone number, this is a service, this is a review, this is a frequently asked question.
Without schema, Google reads your homepage and has to infer that "07700 900123" is a phone number, that "Mon-Fri 8am-6pm" are opening hours, and that the name at the top is a business name rather than the name of an article author. It usually gets this right. But "usually" and "explicitly confirmed" are not the same thing, and the difference shows up in how confidently Google presents your information to searchers.
What it looks like in practice
You've seen schema markup working without knowing it. When you search for a restaurant and the result shows star ratings, opening hours, and a price range directly below the link — that's schema. When you search a question and a drop-down of related questions appears below the result — that's FAQ schema. When a recipe shows a photo and cooking time in the search results — schema again.
For a service business in the UK, the most useful types are:
- LocalBusiness schema — confirms your name, address, phone number, service area, and opening hours to Google in a structured format. Particularly valuable for businesses in competitive local markets like London, Manchester, or Birmingham where Google needs every confidence signal it can get.
- FAQ schema — marks up question-and-answer content so it can appear as expandable results in search. This has become more important with AI search, because FAQ pages with proper schema are significantly more likely to be cited in Google's AI Overview answers.
- Service schema — tells Google what services you offer and connects them to your business entity.
- Review and AggregateRating schema — allows star ratings to appear directly in search results, increasing click-through rates from people who can see your rating before they even visit your site.
Why it's more important now than it was
The shift toward AI-generated search answers has made structured data significantly more valuable. When Google builds an AI Overview response, it pulls from pages it can understand clearly and quickly. Pages with schema markup make that process easier, which makes them more likely to be selected as sources.
Research tracking Google AI Overview citations found that pages with FAQPage schema markup are 3.2 times more likely to appear inside an AI Overview than equivalent pages without it. That's a substantial difference for something that a developer can add to your site in a couple of hours.
The adoption gap: Only 30% of websites currently use any schema markup at all. For small businesses, the number is lower. If you add it now, you're ahead of 70% of your competitors before any other SEO work has been done.
How to check if your site has it
The quickest way is Google's own Rich Results Test, available free at search.google.com/test/rich-results. Paste in your homepage URL and it will tell you whether any structured data is detected and whether it's valid. If nothing comes back, your site has no schema markup at all.
A second check is Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org — same process, paste in your URL, and it shows you what's there and flags any errors. Both tools are free and take under a minute to use.
Getting it added
If your site is on WordPress, plugins like RankMath or Yoast SEO handle basic schema automatically once configured. If your site is custom-built or on a different platform, the schema markup gets added as a block of JSON code in the page head — it's invisible to visitors, requires no design changes, and a competent developer can implement the core types in an afternoon.
The full audit covers schema as one of its four assessed areas, alongside performance, core SEO signals, and AI search readiness. If you want to know specifically what type your site is missing and what to prioritise, that's the most direct route to a clear answer.