Google Using schema.org for Local Business Information
Google is now piloting a program that allows local business owners to provide information about their business by using schema.org. By providing with a mix of required, recommended and optional properties with values for the schema.org LocalBusiness class, a business can now provide Google with information about things like the business’s name, address, telephone number, physical location and hours of operation.
Google has supported the provision of local business information with schema.org since April 2014, but this is the first time they’ve published prescribed property specifications for LocalBusiness.
This is also the first time they’ve explicitly tied the use of such data to the generation of a dynamic feature in the search engine results, namely a local business Knowledge Panel that shows business information and, if applicable, links to a page or app where customers can place an order or make a reservation.
The Local Business Information page on Google Developers notes that the pilot is currently restricted to a set of initial data providers, but that they “hope to soon open up the feature so any provider who implements spec-compliant markup is eligible to participate.”
The LocalBusiness properties Google supports are as follows, with required properties in bold, and recommended properties in italics.
- name
- address
- geo (the geo coordinates of a place)
- telephone
- potentialAction (used if customers can make an reservation or place an order online)
- openingHours
- menu
- acceptsReservations (used to indicate if the business accepts reservations or not)
- department (used to provide the same information about a sub-unit of the business)
Google recommends providing this information using JSON-LD
The specification also calls for the required declaration of a value for @id. @id is a “stable, globally-unique identifier of the specific business location.”
@id is not a LocalBusiness property but a JSON-LD reserved key. And although (as Kenichi Suzuki and Grace Massa Langlois have noted) it’s not used in the JSON-LD example on Local Business Information page, it is used on the child Place Actions page, where the value provided is a URI.
The schema.org data feed
The Place Actions page was originally spotted by Menashe Avramov as a menu link that resulted in a page not found error. The parent Local Business Information page itself sports a tantalizing teaser 404. The specification states that there are two ways a business may provide Google with LocalBusiness data.
How you provide the items to Google varies depending on the number of business locations.
- If you have a single business location: Embed schema.org markup on your official web site.
- If you have multiple business locations: Provide a schema.org data feed.
The link to the “schema.org data feed” currently leads to a 404 page.
This is the first mention of a schema.org data feed. While schema.org information can be provided in JSON-LD without that information being visible on a web page, that this link exists to a separate specification page and that a JSON-LD is already recommended suggests that this will introduce a new data format for providing schema.org-declared information, rather than simply providing further JSON-LD specifications.
Local Business Place Actions
As noted above it was the Place Actions page that originally captured the interest of SEOs – even though the parent Local Business Information specification is more broadly applicable, as the use of LocalBusiness properties described there isn’t limited to businesses that support reservations or orders.
Indeed, Place Actions requires the business provide the core data described on the Local Business Information page, information that the Place Actions Page refers to as data that “disambiguates the business.”
Place Actions allows businesses to provide information that allows “users to directly engage with local businesses by enabling users to place orders, make appointments and complete reservations.”
This is facilitated by the use of the potentialAction property applied to the same LocalBuisiness entity described by the properties used for disambiguation, with either an OrderAction or ReserveAction nested under it.
By providing these data, a business may be able to generate “a prominent ‘Knowledge Panel’ card with details about the searched-for business”, with Place Actions appearing in the card as deep links to “provider web landing pages or apps” where the action can be completed.”
It’s interesting to note that the data provided not only allows businesses to generate a Panel link that will allow the customer to place an order or make a reservation on a web page, but to perform those same options using an app if one is available.
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