Most UK service-business websites ship LocalBusiness schema and stop there. That's the single biggest schema miss we see across UK trades, healthcare, and professional services. Eight schema types do most of the heavy lifting for a UK local business. Adding the other seven where appropriate is some of the highest-leverage technical SEO work available, and increasingly the foundation for AI search citations too.
This piece walks through the eight schema types every UK local business should ship, what each one does, and where to put them. Pairs with our wider AEO playbook and the GBP optimisation post.
The eight schema types every UK local business needs
1 · LocalBusiness
The foundation. Identifies you as a local business with a physical (or service-area) presence. Required fields: name, address, phone, opening hours, geo coordinates. Use a more specific subtype where it applies (Plumber, Dentist, MedicalOrganization, Electrician, etc.) for stronger signal.
2 · Service
One per service page. Tells Google exactly what you offer, where you serve, what it costs (or starts at), and who provides it. The most-missed schema type on UK service-business sites and the biggest single AEO unlock.
3 · FAQPage
On every page with a FAQ block. Enables the FAQ accordion rich result on Google. Highest direct AEO value: AI search engines preferentially cite question-answer pairs because they map cleanly into a generated answer.
4 · Article (or BlogPosting)
On every blog post. Fields: headline, author, publisher, date published, date modified, image. Combined with author entity SEO, this is what gets blog content cited by AI search engines.
5 · BreadcrumbList
On every page. Generates the breadcrumb trail in Google search results, lifting CTR. Cheap, high-signal context for both Google and AI search. Ours ships automatically on every blog post via the Next.js dynamic route.
6 · Review
For individual customer reviews displayed on the site. Contains the rating, the review body, the reviewer name, and the date. Combined with AggregateRating, drives the star rating in search results.
7 · AggregateRating
The overall rating across all reviews. Drives the star-rating display in Google search results and Knowledge Panel. Genuine first-party data only, Google penalises fabricated aggregate ratings.
8 · HowTo
For any process content (the 5 steps, the 10 things, the playbook). Direct AEO citation target. Often the highest-converting schema type for top-of-funnel educational content.
Implementation patterns that work
For a UK service-business website, the schema implementation should be:
- JSON-LD format, Google's recommended format, easy to maintain, doesn't pollute HTML
- Per-page contextual schema, Service schema on service pages, Article schema on blog posts, FAQPage where there's a FAQ block
- Site-wide LocalBusiness schema, typically rendered in the layout root or footer, on every page
- Dynamic generation, Next.js, the framework we build on, generates schema from page metadata automatically
- Validation in CI, fail the build if schema doesn't pass Google's Rich Results Test
Validating your schema
Three tools to run after any schema deployment:
- Google's Rich Results Test · The official check for whether your schema can produce rich results in Google search
- Schema.org Validator · Stricter than Google; catches spec issues that won't break rich results but still indicate sloppy implementation
- Google Search Console Enhancements report · Live tracking of impressions, clicks, and errors on your published rich results
Run all three after deploying schema changes. Check Search Console weekly for the first 30 days, monthly thereafter. Schema errors are a measurable, fixable problem; ignoring them costs you rich-result eligibility.
The AEO bonus
AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) read structured data with very high confidence because it eliminates natural-language interpretation guesswork. Pages with proper FAQPage and Service schema get cited significantly more often than pages without.
The compounding effect: Google rich results lift CTR; ChatGPT and Perplexity citations lift entity prominence; entity prominence feeds back into Google ranking. Schema markup in 2026 is the single highest-leverage technical investment for both traditional SEO and AEO at the same time.