JSON-LD for Small Business Sites: 4 Schema Types That Matter

Machines do not infer. A human sees your homepage and knows in a second that you are a bakery in Sacramento. A crawler sees text and guesses. JSON-LD removes the guessing: a small script block, invisible to visitors, that states in schema.org vocabulary exactly what the page is.

Search engines have used it for years to build rich results. AI assistants read it too, and for them it is even more valuable: typed facts they can lift straight into an answer.

The four types that cover most sites

LocalBusiness (or plain Organization if you are not local): name, address, phone, opening hours, price range. Goes on the homepage. This is the single highest-value block for a local company.
Service: what you offer, the area you serve, who provides it. One per major service page.
Product: name, price, availability, reviews. For shops, this is what makes listings eligible for price and stock in results.
FAQPage: your questions and answers in machine-readable form, on any page with an FAQ section.

A minimal example

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Rowan Bakery",
  "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "addressLocality": "Sacramento", "addressRegion": "CA" },
  "telephone": "+1-916-555-0100",
  "url": "https://rowanbakery.com"
}
</script>

Ground rules

Only mark up what is visibly true on the page; invented ratings and stuffed keywords get schema ignored or penalized. Match the type to the page, one main entity each. On WordPress, your SEO plugin can output most of this, but only after you configure the business type and details, which loops back to the installed-but-unconfigured trap covered earlier on this blog.

Our scan checks every crawled page for JSON-LD presence and whether the types fit the business. Missing schema is one of the most common AI visibility fails, and one of the fastest to fix.

Quick answers

What is JSON-LD?

JSON-LD is structured data: a small script block that describes your page to machines using schema.org vocabulary. Search engines and AI systems use it to understand what your business is, what you sell, and what your page answers.

Which schema types should a small business use?

Start with LocalBusiness or Organization on the homepage, Service or Product on offer pages, and FAQPage where you answer questions. Those four cover most small-business sites.