Schema & Structured Data

A written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown when an image fails to load. It is both an accessibility requirement and the only way search engines reliably know what a photo shows.

In practice “Boat hull after bottom paint, Beaufort NC” is useful to a blind visitor, to Google Images, and to you. “IMG_4471.jpg” is useful to nobody.

Markup describing where a page sits in your site’s hierarchy. Google uses it to replace the raw URL in search results with a readable trail, which measurably improves click-through on deep pages.

In practice “ncaisvc.com › Services › Web Presence › GEO” reads considerably better in results than a long URL, and it is one of the few rich result types Google has not retired.

Markup that labels question-and-answer pairs on a page. Google retired FAQ rich results in Search on 7 May 2026, so it no longer produces the expandable dropdowns — but it remains valid schema that Google still parses to understand a page, and it helps AI tools lift clean question-answer pairs.

In practice Keep the markup; drop the expectation. If a proposal still promises expandable FAQ results in Google, it is selling something that no longer exists.

The format Google recommends for schema markup — a self-contained block of data placed in the page’s code, separate from the visible content. Because it is not tangled into your layout, a redesign cannot silently destroy it.

In practice It can also be generated from the same data that renders the page, which means the markup cannot drift out of sync with the hours a visitor actually sees.

The schema type describing a physical business: name, address, phone, hours, service area, and price range. For a local service business it is the single highest-value piece of markup on the site, and it belongs on every page rather than just the contact page.

In practice This is the markup that supports being treated as a real entity — the thing that has to happen before Google or an AI assistant will state facts about you with confidence.

The short summary you write for a page, often shown beneath its title in search results. It is not a ranking factor, but it is your advertising copy on the results page — and Google will rewrite it if yours does not match the query.

In practice Treat it as the sentence that wins the click, not as a place to repeat keywords. Naming your town and what you actually do beats a description stuffed with search terms.

An older way of adding schema by sprinkling attributes through your visible HTML. Still valid, but it entangles content and markup, which is why JSON-LD has largely replaced it.

In practice If your current site uses microdata, the practical risk is a redesign quietly stripping it out with nothing failing visibly.

Tags controlling the title, description, and image shown when your link is shared on social media or pasted into a text message. Without them the platform picks something for you, usually badly.

In practice A customer texting your link to a friend is a referral. Whether that arrives as a clean card with your logo or as a bare URL with a random cropped image is decided by these tags.

Search listings enhanced with extra detail pulled from your structured data — star ratings, prices, breadcrumbs, event dates. Which types qualify changes over time, and Google dropped FAQ rich results entirely in May 2026.

In practice Worth pursuing, worth not depending on. Google adds and removes result types on its own schedule, so schema is better justified by machine comprehension than by any one visual enhancement.

A schema field listing your official profiles elsewhere — Facebook, LinkedIn, your Google listing, an industry association page. It is how you tell search engines that all those accounts are the same business as this website.

In practice Small field, real effect. It directly supports entity resolution, which is the thing standing between you and being confidently named in an AI answer.

Standardized labels added to a page that spell out what its content actually means — that this text is a price, that one is an address, this block is your opening hours. Search engines and AI models read it directly instead of inferring it from your prose.

In practice A page shows “(252) 555-0142.” A person reads a phone number; a machine reads eleven characters. Schema is how you state that it is the telephone number, of this business, at this address, open these hours.

Markup describing a specific service you offer, who provides it, and where. It lets you state a fact plainly instead of hoping a crawler infers it from marketing copy.

In practice Declaring that you do bottom painting, in Beaufort, at this price range, is far more reliable than trusting a machine to extract that from a paragraph about your commitment to quality.

The general term for information formatted so machines can read it reliably, of which schema markup is the web’s standard flavor. It is the difference between a page a computer can display and one it can understand.

In practice It matters more now than it did five years ago. Systems that answer questions rather than list links need to be confident about a fact before repeating it.