Schema.org defines almost 800 types. Agencies love quoting that number, because it makes structured data sound like a specialist discipline you should outsource forever. For a typical SME website, you need three.
1. Organization — who you are
One block, site-wide, in the shared head of every page. It tells machines your canonical name, your website, and what you do:
- name: your real registered or trading name, spelled the way you want AI to spell it
- url: your canonical domain
- description: one factual sentence (the answer-shaped formula — category, area, a real number — works here too)
- inLanguage: the language your site actually uses — machine-verifiable, so don't guess it
This is identity data. It belongs on every page because every page is you.
2. FAQPage — your answers
Covered in depth in our FAQ guide, so just the placement rule here: it goes only on the page that visibly shows the questions and answers, never in a shared template. Page-specific content in a site-wide layout is how you end up with homepage FAQs stamped onto every page of the site — we've measured a real case where that hit 218 pages.
3. ItemList — your services
A structured list of what you sell: each service's real name, and its real URL if it has a page. This gives engines the shape of your offering — "this business sells exactly these things" — instead of leaving them to infer it from navigation menus. Like FAQPage, it belongs on the page that presents the list, typically the homepage.
What to skip, and why
- Product with prices you don't keep current. Stale structured prices are worse than none: they get quoted after they've changed, and now the AI is misquoting you with your own markup as the source.
- Review/AggregateRating on self-published praise. Marking up your own testimonials as ratings is exactly the pattern engines discount, and it flirts with policy violations. Reviews earn weight on third-party platforms, not in your own markup.
- BreadcrumbList, Speakable, and the long tail — fine, harmless, but they move nothing for a small site. Add them when everything above exists and you're bored.
- LocalBusiness deserves a special note: it's legitimate and relevant if you have a physical location — but the map cards AI shows for "near me" questions come from Apple's and Google's merchant registries, not from your markup. LocalBusiness schema complements a merchant profile; it cannot replace one.
The discipline that matters more than the type list
Every value in your structured data must be a fact that also appears in your visible content, in the language of the page it sits on. Machines increasingly cross-check markup against page text; a mismatch reads as either sloppiness or deception, and both cost trust. Structured data is a machine-readable index of your site — never a second, prettier version of reality.