What structured data is and why some pages stand out

Structured data is a few lines of code that tell Google explicitly what is on a page: that this is a hair salon, that it closes at 8pm, that an article has an author and a date. Google uses it to show your result more richly — with opening hours, a price, a breadcrumb path or extra links. It does not raise your position directly, but it affects how much space you take up once you do appear.

Put differently: the text on the page is for people, and structured data is the same information written so a machine cannot misread it.

What Google sees without it

Google reads plain text, but it guesses. If a page says "Mon–Sat 09–20", it has to work out that those are opening hours and not a price range. If it says "from 800 KM", it has to work out what that figure refers to.

With structured data there is no guessing. The page carries an invisible block of code saying: the type is a local business, this is the address, this is the phone number, these are the opening hours. A visitor never sees that block. Google and other tools see it exactly.

That is why it is called "structured" — the same information, in the structure a machine expects. The format is called JSON-LD, and that is all you need to know about it.

What small businesses usually mark up

You do not need all of it. For most businesses here, four or five things are worth doing:

• Local business — name, address, phone, opening hours, map location. The most important one if people come to your premises.
• Service or product — what you offer and, if you want, a starting price. That turns "from 800 KM" into data rather than just text.
• Breadcrumb path — the result shows "badycodes.com › services › web development" instead of a bare link.
• Article — for a blog: headline, author, publication date. It helps the piece appear as an article rather than as any other subpage.
• Questions and answers — a frequently-asked section, marked up as questions and answers.

All of it is written once. Done properly, the only thing that changes later is what would change anyway — opening hours, a price, new content.

What structured data cannot do

This is where it tends to get oversold, so let us be precise.

• It does not raise rankings on its own. If the site is slow and thin on content, markup will not fix that.
• It does not guarantee anything appears. Markup is an offer of data. Google decides whether to show it, and changes that decision whenever it likes.
• It must not lie. Reviews you never received, a price that is not on the page, opening hours that no longer hold — that breaks Google's rules and can cost you rich results across the whole site.

The rule is simple: only mark up what a visitor can actually see on that page.

How to check your own site

Two free checks, no developer needed:

1. Open Google's Rich Results Test and paste in your page address. It will tell you which types it found and where the errors are.
2. In Google Search Console, if you have it set up, there is a report per markup type. It shows what Google rejected, and why.

If the first check finds nothing, your site has no structured data. That is not a disaster, but it is a missed opportunity that takes a few hours of work to fix. On the sites I build it is included as standard — it is one of the few jobs where small effort has a visible effect in search results.

What next

Send me a link to your site through the contact form and I will tell you what Google currently sees on it and what it does not. Free, no obligation.

Frequently asked

Can I add structured data myself if I use WordPress? You can, with a plugin that generates it. Just make sure two plugins are not writing the same type — duplicate markup is a more common problem than none at all.

Will I get star ratings in search? Only if the ratings genuinely exist and are shown on the page, and if Google decides to display them. Google is particularly strict about ratings for your own services, so I do not promise that to anyone.