How do I make my local business services stand out on Google?

Making your local business stand out on Google to show to your audience and potential customers is one of the core services that many agencies and SEO specialists provide. However, many agencies fail to implement this properly with schema markup when it comes to service based businesses and local businesses that do not offer a product but something unquantifiable in numbers.

Why can’t I use product schema markup?

Product schema is already a well-known Google rich result for marking up individual products on an E-Commerce website but the application is strictly limited to products that can be quantified, shipped and/or actually held in a customer’s hands. Taken from the Google search guidelines is the below excerpt.

We don’t allow content that promotes widely prohibited or regulated goods, services, or information that may facilitate serious, immediate, or long term harm to people. This includes content related to firearms and weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco and vaping products, and gambling-related products.

– Google search guidelines on product rich results

This is quite an issue for service based businesses as it immediately puts your business on the backfoot compared to e-commerce businesses that offer BOTH a product and a service meaning they are in direct competition with your business and can take advantage of local business schema markup that you do not have. This could have a huge impact on the clickthrough rate as seen below. Consider this example of which result is more likely to be clicked on by a customer, or even you as a business owner and user of Google when viewing various Massage Guns and looking to buy one.

Also, importantly, rich result local business schema markup helps you rank higher on search result pages!

How do I markup services on Google?

There is a solution for this to a certain extent! It has not yet been fully implemented by Google search engine and other search engines however there is a services schema mark up that is valid for use on your website to mark up your services. This will not show as a rich result like the screenshots above unfortunately however it will directly drip feed information about your business to Google and tell it exactly what services you offer and what is the output of it, as in what do customers get out of that service. Check out how that would look like below.

This can be roughly understood and easily understood by a search robot.

It is basically telling Google that “Best SEO Agency” offer SEO services in Australia and you can get Rank 1 on Google search results from the service. This is extremely helpful to add on a service page of the website that describes the service and provides items like what is included with the service and pricing information. It is easy to see why this can give a website an edge in the search results.

How do I generate my own local business schema for services?

To generate your own localbusiness schema for services you can use our handy localbusiness schema generator to help you make perfect Google friendly schema markup code to add to your website. If you are not confident in adding this code to your website, feel free to get in touch with us our one of our SEO Agency partners to help out!