Schema Markup: Where It Helps and Where It Doesn't
Structured data gets oversold and then, in the backlash, undersold. The accurate position is narrow: it doesn't raise your rankings, and on certain page types it substantially changes how you appear in results — which changes your click-through rate, which is what you actually wanted.
What it does
Schema markup is a machine-readable description of what's on a page. It doesn't tell a search engine anything a careful reader couldn't work out; it removes the guesswork.
The payoff is eligibility for rich results — star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, event dates, product prices, recipe times. Eligibility, not entitlement. You can implement it perfectly and see nothing.
Where it reliably earns its keep
LocalBusiness, for anyone with a physical location. Name, address, phone, hours, geographic coordinates. It reinforces everything your Google Business Profile says, and consistency between the two matters.
Product, for anything sold online. Price, availability, and rating in the results is the difference between being clicked and being scrolled past.
Article / BlogPosting, for content. Author, publish date, headline. Modest, but it makes the date visible, which affects whether people click on anything time-sensitive.
FAQPage, where you genuinely have questions and answers. Handle with care — display of FAQ rich results has been restricted repeatedly, and stuffing invented questions onto a service page to farm result space is exactly the behaviour that caused the restriction.
Event, Recipe, JobPosting, Course — highly effective for the specific businesses they apply to, and irrelevant for everyone else.
BreadcrumbList, which replaces the raw URL in the result with a readable path. Small, cheap, universally applicable.
Where it doesn't help
On a generic service page with no rich result type, structured data changes nothing visible. It's still fine to include the basics — it's cheap and it clarifies your site's structure — but it isn't a lever.
It also won't rescue a thin page. Structured data describes content; it doesn't create it.
The rules that keep you out of trouble
Mark up what's on the page. Ratings shown in schema and nowhere on the page are a violation, and penalties for it are applied.
Don't invent reviews. Self-serving review markup on your own site is against the guidelines and is checked.
Keep it accurate as things change. Prices, hours, and availability in schema that no longer match reality are worse than no schema at all — a visitor who arrives to find the price wrong has been actively misled.
Validate it. Both the schema validator and the rich results test, on real URLs, after launch.
The practical minimum
For a typical service business: Organization and LocalBusiness sitewide, BreadcrumbList on inner pages, BlogPosting on articles. That's an afternoon, it's stable, and it covers essentially all the available value.
Everything past that is specific to what you sell — and worth doing precisely when it is.