What is structured data?
Structured data is extra code placed in a web page that labels what its content means — that this figure is a price, this line is an opening time, this number is a rating — using a vocabulary search engines already understand. Visitors never see it; it exists so a machine does not have to guess.
Why it matters to a shop
Without it a search engine reads your page as ordinary text and has to work out for itself that "Tue 11am–8pm" is your opening hours and that the number beside a dish is a price rather than a product code. With it, the result for your page can carry the extra lines you have seen on other results: a star rating, a price, an event date, whether an item is in stock. That does not lift your position — nobody can promise that — but it changes how much of the answer is visible before someone decides whether to click.
Three checks before you touch any code
- Decide what the page actually is. A shop's home page is a local business; a page selling one item is a product; a page listing dates is an event. One page has one main type, and picking the wrong one is worse than adding nothing at all.
- Make what the code says match what a visitor sees. Markup declaring a price the page does not show, or a rating nobody left, is a policy violation with a real penalty attached, not a shortcut. The rule is short: if it is not on the page, do not mark it up.
- Test the published address, not a draft. Google's Rich Results Test and Search Console both read a public URL and list what they found there. Fix anything reported as an error; items reported as warnings are optional fields you can leave empty. To see the raw markup a page carries, use your browser's view-source — and LocalSite Studio, our desktop app, can export the site's source code so you can read it directly.
Common mistake: Believing it is a ranking trick, or that adding it guarantees stars in the result. Search engines decide case by case whether to show a rich result at all, and markup that does not match the visible page can get the feature withdrawn from the whole site.