Schema for Small Business SEO & Website Optimization

Small businesses are usually local businesses. They face challenges in marketing and optimizing their websites for better exposure in the search engines. Fortunately, with Schema and website optimization, you get your business on “the map” and encourage the search engines to rank your business higher in the results.

In order to take advantage of this website optimization technique, you need to make sure when you implement schema onto a website that your contact information and business’ geographic are correctly listed in your website.

Schema.org provides under the section Local Business a wide range of business categories that you can implement as part of the contact page or the footer on your website. The information you can fill in includes accepted payment types, phone and fax, address, and opening hours.

How Schema Works

Schema markup uses div tags that are not displayed on the live website but they rather have the role to inform the search engines with specific information that applies to the chosen schema markup. Listing your business is the most important step. That will inform the search engines about your business’ physical location. A search engine cannot discover on its own that you have a physical location but by creating your local business listing you can inform your potential clients about.

• your contact information
• your hours
• your location
• distinguishing features of you brand
• services you offer

In order to achieve this goal for website optimization, you need to create a listing with both Bing Places for Business and with Google Places. There are also general listing services such as Yellow Pages and industry specific directories and search engines that are worth registering with.

Improved SEO & Website Optimization

A small business is also targeting a local market. For this reason all your SEO and website optimization efforts should be focused on location. Local small business SEO can be improved by using LocalBusiness Schema Markup in order to help the search engines find you and display information relevant to local searchers, your prospective clients.

This is important because people use the internet more and more in order to find local business information. Data such as emails, phone numbers, addresses, business names, and logos are what the prospective clients are expecting to find online. Search engines can easily display all these data if you use the schema markup code to signal them.

Search engines support several marking up formats such as Microdata format, RDFa, and Microformats. In order to work with schema markup you need some basic knowledge of HTML. Depending on your setup, you have to insert some code on your website. Schema markup can be inserted on in line with the existing HTML code on your web pages by using span and div tags. This way you can markup your content like firm name, address and phone number.

Whether you handle your web marketing in-house or work with a website optimization company, schema markup will not be visible to your website visitors but search engines will use it in order to index, retrieve, and display this information to users that make relevant queries. This way you will improve your local small business SEO and website optimization efforts.

For better SERP results it is also important to use location specific keywords and title tags that are location specific. This will improve your search engines results page and will increase the probability that your prospective clients find your small business online.