Schema Markup for Local Search SEO

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, I’m sure you have at some point come across a post in regards to the importance of Schema markup for SEO purposes on websites. My question to you is simply, Are you using schema? Most individuals I speak to understand that they should be using it but fall into one of two categories: 1.) They are overwhelmed when they begin to try to make headway with the markup, or 2.) They simply can’t be bothered. But what’s the big deal, right? Schema is relatively new and somewhat unimportant, isn’t it?

Wrong. Would you believe that Schema.org was introduced by Google in June of 2011? More than that, Google introduced rich snippets in 2009 as a way for results to better describe search results looking for people or reviews. So if you haven’t begun using snippets, not only are you late to the game, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to help you or your client’s website to draw traffic through search.

Contents

The Most Basic Schema You Can Use
Our Results With Markup
Conclusion

The Most Basic Schema You Can Use

The purpose of our post today is not to go into the many examples of how schema is used or even to go in depth into the details of the markup. All we want to do is to give you a quick method of adding schema to your website that will make an immediate impact on your local search results: using markup for the location of your business.

Your City On Your Page

To start, we’re assuming that you either have a page dedicated to the city you are servicing or that your home page at some point mentions the city you service within the content. More than likely you even have the city mentioned within the footer of your site. To help the search engines understand that you are actually stating that you service that city, you need to add the markup property for “address”. We’re not going to worry about your street address with today’s markup; all we want is the city and province/state you are located in.

The Markup

So, without making you wait any longer, here’s the markup you need. Simply fill in your city and province/state in the pertinent areas:

CITY, PROVINCE/STATE

And that’s it! Now, find a spot on your page that is appropriate and add this information in.

Check If It’s Correct

Google has a handy tool that you can use to check your page to make sure you have the markup correct, their “Testing Tool“. In the left column click “Fetch URL”, add in the URL of the page you want to test, and the results will appear in the right column.

Our Results With Markup

DISCLAIMER: We don’t necessarily recommend you try this, but it got us results…

Our example comes from a business located in Vancouver, BC. One aspect of their business that they wanted to highlight was that even though they didn’t have a physical address in Seattle, WA, they did service Seattle by delivering their goods to the city. So, we added a line in their footer that stated “Also servicing Seattle, WA” with the markup. Shortly thereafter they had a jump in their rankings for Seattle.

Conclusion

Using markup won’t cause your site to go from page 10 to #1 for search results, but it will make a difference for your rankings. However, since Google has explicitly stated that this is a method for search engines to understand your site better, why would you ignore it? So get to work and get marking up your site!