Structured data has the worst marketing history of anything we touch. It got sold as a ranking trick, it got stuffed, and then people noticed it did not lift their positions and stopped maintaining it. That is the wrong conclusion from a real fact: schema is not a boost, it is a statement of what your page says, and an unmaintained statement is worse than none.
What we mark up, and why
- The business. Name, address, geo coordinates, telephone, opening hours, the areas served. On a local service site this is the one that stops an engine inventing your hours.
- The service. One per service page, with the description taken from the page itself and the area it covers.
- Breadcrumbs. Cheap, boring, and the difference between a search result showing a URL and showing where the page sits.
- FAQ, only where the questions are on the page. This is the rule people break, and it is the one that gets a site’s markup distrusted.
- Article on the notes. Author, publisher, dates – the fields a summary needs to attribute the work.
The rules that keep it honest
Mark up what a human can see on the page. Do not add a price, a rating or an opening hour that is not printed. And keep it in sync: schema rots silently, because the service page got edited in the dashboard and the markup was generated from a template nobody opened again.
The way we avoid that is to stop having two sources. The address, phone and hours in the footer and the ones in the JSON-LD come out of the same Customizer fields, so the owner edits one place and both change. It is not a clever idea. It is the only one that survives the fourth time someone updates a phone number.
How we check it
Validation at build time, then the Search Console reports for whichever enhancements the site claims – and once a quarter we diff the markup against the page copy. That last step is where the drift shows up: a service renamed in March and still described under its old name to every machine that reads the page.
Will any of this move you up the results? Mostly not, and anyone promising that is selling you something else. What it does is make sure that when the page is shown, what is said about it is correct – your hours, your area, what you actually sell. That is worth the maintenance. What it is not worth is setting up once and never touching again.
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