LocalBusiness schema for service-area businesses

Structured data for a business that travels to its customers is mostly about restraint: one organisation, one graph per page, and a Service entity that says where you actually work.

LocalBusiness describes the business, not the page

There is one of you. Your site should declare one LocalBusiness (or a subtype like Plumber or Electrician) with your real name, base address and contact details. Forty area pages do not mean forty LocalBusiness nodes with forty faked addresses; search engines read that as what it is.

Service plus areaServed is the local pair

Each service-area page is best described as a Service: the service type, the provider (a reference back to your one business node), and areaServed naming the place the page is about. That mirrors the truth: same business, same service, different area. Add BreadcrumbList so the page’s position in the site is explicit.

One graph per page, even with an SEO plugin

Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress already publish your organisation node. Anything else that adds schema must reference that node, not redeclare it, or the page carries two competing organisations with the same id and search engines have to guess. The rule generalises: every entity declared once, everything else by reference.

FAQ markup, honestly

FAQPage markup belongs only on pages where the questions and answers are visible text. Since 2023 Google shows FAQ rich results for very few sites, so treat the markup as machine-readable structure rather than a rankings lever. It still helps AI search systems quote you accurately.

Where Townsmith fits

Townsmith ships two schema modes. Standalone, it emits the full graph: LocalBusiness from your business profile, Service with areaServed, breadcrumbs, and FAQ markup only when the page answers questions in visible details blocks. With an SEO plugin active it steps back and emits just the Service piece, wired by reference to your plugin’s organisation node. Detection happens at render time, so there is never a duplicate LocalBusiness, whichever way you configure the site. The feature list has the rest.