What Is Schema and How To Easily Add It To Your Website

Schema for local businesses. So what is schema? Local business schema is a type of structured data markup code you can add to your business’s website to make it easier for search engines to identify what type of business you are, and what you do. So essentially, it’s all about adding code to your website to give Google more information about what you are, and what you do. This is super beneficial, as the more information Google has about your website, it means the better it understands what you do, and the services you provide.

Meaning, if someone went on to Google, and carried out a search for a service you offer, in your city, as Google has a clear understanding about what you do and the services you provide, it’s more likely Google will return your website to the user, over a website that has no schema on the site. So as you can imagine, it’s a major ranking factor for local SEO, so do not skip this part. So like I said, it involves adding code to your site.

I’m going to show you a process which makes it really, really simple, as you don’t have to get into any code at all you can simply just copy and paste it over to your site, literally control C, control V, so I’ll show you how we do that now. So what we have here is a local schema generator. So you didn’t think I was gonna make you create your schema from scratch now, did you? So this is a local scheme generator, to access this page you wanna go to bit.ly/SchemaGenerator, and as usual, the URL is case sensitive, so you will need a capital S on schema, and at capital G on generator.

So before I get into this, it’s important to note that, this generator only works with GMBs that have a visible address. So, well, first things first, your GMB needs to be verified, so hopefully by now, as you’ve gone past the GMB section in the course, your GMB is already verified, If it’s not, go ahead and verify it, and then come back to this video. So for this scheme to work, you need to have a visible address. So once you’re on this screen, you want to plug in your business name, So mine would be LevelFinish. And then from the drop down menu, you want to select your business, so this would be me, LevelFinish, right here.

This one now pull in all the details when you’re a GMB listing, which is great, saves us tons of time. And now for optional information, you need to enter a URL of your social media properties. You can put in as many as you want, however, just for the purpose of this video, I’m going go one, which will be my Twitter profile, so, my social media information in this box, in the box below will be a short description of your business, so I’ve already prepared one earlier, So I will copy of that, and then paste it in the box. Do make sure from the drop down menu, you have the relevant one selected.

So for me, it’d be a local business, and most likely be the same for you, as this course is about local business SEO. Second box would be a URL of an image on the website, so it’s typically advised to get an image describing something that you do. So for example, I’m a flooring contractor, so I wanna get images of either hardwood or a carpet, so let’s just go to the carpet page and let’s just find an image of some carpet. So you can go for this one, or this one, let’s take this one.

So let’s go to copy image address, and now I’ll go back to the schema markup, and now paste that there, that is now pasting the URL of my image, so if I went over to Google and searched for that URL, that should then direct me to a whole page about the image, which is perfect. URL or the contact page, so just go to the site, and then go to the contact page, and simply copy that, go back to the generator and paste it on there. Contact email for the business. So what I want to do now is get an email address. I should have one in a fitter of the site. So info at LevelFinish. I will paste that there.

URL of the logo, so this would just simply be a logo of the site. So it’ll be the same process. If I go back to LevelFinish, right click my logo, and then click copy image address. This will now bring in image address in a URL, just like so. Currency is the currency you operate in, so I’ll just put in dollars, and example one and example two is essentially the price of your services, so, if your prices or your services are quite cheap, maybe put in, start from zero and then go up to $100.

If your installation processes or your services are a lot more expensive, maybe they start at a hundred dollars, put it in a hundred, and maybe they go up to 10,000, so you’d add that. So for me, I’m just gonna leave mine at 10 to 1000 for now. And then a Wikipedia URL about this niche. So this is just to give Google more information about exactly what your business does. So like I said, LevelFinish is a flooring contractor, so what I’ve gotta do, I’m gonna Google flooring contractor, Wikipedia, and see what comes up. Just wanna find something relevant about flooring in Wikipedia so, I’ve got flooring here. “Flooring is a general term, “which also can include carpet, “laminate, tile, vinyl.”

So perfect. So this describes what we do, flooring. So I’m gonna copy this, go back to my schema generator, paste that in, and I’m gonna click submit. What that has just done now is created what I call my schema markup code, so, the next thing for me to do, is to add this over to my site. So before I do that, I just wanna show you how you would do it If you didn’t have a GMB with visible address. So like I said, you’d come on the same URL, and then you’d click here. Once you click here, you will land on a page like this.

so essentially you have to put in the same information however, you have to get your latitude and longitude coordinates of your GMB listing, so, I’ll show you how to do that now. So again, you wanna make sure you have a local business selected, have the right category, so home and construction business for me, putting my business name, the URL is same your URL, It’s going to be your social media profile. So, if you have multiple, just click add same as, and you keep adding them, like, so. And then you want put in a logo URL. Again, I’ve just shown you how to do that, It’ll be the same thing for here.

It will be same for the image of your business as well. Same for description, then you have your address as standard. So for the latitude and longitude, what you need to do is go over to Google maps, and simply find your GMB listing. So for me, it would be LevelFinish.

Once it comes up I now I wanna right click the name LevelFinish, or the marker. And click what’s here. When you click what’s here, you’ll see your longitude and latitude coordinates appear below. So, there also should be in a search at the top. So what we’re gonna do is copy those, so this would be the first one, go back to there and I wanna paste in my latitude, and then I wanna go for the longitude for this part, so again, it’ll be up here. So make sure you include the minus If you do have one. So I’ll copy that, and then I’ll paste that in there. Include a map, so this would just be a map listing for your business.

So if I just delete all that, and then search for LevelFinish just to make sure it loads, make sure I’ve got the right listing.

Just click that from drop down menu. Okay, so I do need that in, that’s fine. So just copy the whole URL when you’re on the original page and then paste that in, include a map. Obviously add your business hours as usual,

so if you open at 8:30, and then we close at 5:00 PM, so just get that added right there. And then you want to scroll down and make sure you have your phone selected for the contact type, and then put in your telephone number like so. So once you’ve done that, you can see it will then generate your local schema, and then you simply want to copy that over to your site. So now you know how to generate schema for businesses that have GMB address on show, and ones that don’t have the address on show on the GMB, It’s time to add it to our site.

So if I go back to this one, for example, I simply wanna copy it all. And before I add it to my site, I wanna test it, so Google have a free schema structured data testing source, so essentially you need to go over to this URL which is search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool. And once you’re on there you can put in your code snippet. Can’t talk today guys, sorry about that. And then you wanna paste in all of your code and then click run test. So, this will be Google, just pulling in information about your business so you can yep, I’m a local business, this is my URL, this is my business name, the hours I operate, all this information, which is perfect.

And you’ll see from the top there’s zero errors and zero warnings. So this means it’s schema is good to go and can be added to my site. So to add it to your site, you need to use the plugin insert headers and footers. I’ve actually used this tool already early on in the section, I think in the first section when we’re setting up your Google analytics and your Google search console. So if you’re not sure how to get the plugin installed and what plugin you need, please do refer back to the video. However, just to show you for ease, it’s gonna be this plugin right here, called insert headers and footers by WPBeginner, so WordPress beginner.

So to access the plugin what you need to do is go to settings, go to insert headers and footers, and then in the script for the headers, you wanna go to the top, go below all the code you have right there, It’s important you don’t break it up. So do just pay attention to the little scroll icon on the right, make sure you’re right at the bottom, and then click return, and paste all of your code in there and simply click save. That’s it, that’s essentially how you add local business schema to your website, It’s really that simple.