Reference guide · technical-seo · Published 2026-08-16 · 5 min read
Structured data types that still matter
Structured data for SEO: Product, Service, LocalBusiness, FAQ and HowTo status, and how to implement and test schema now.
- ·What still works
- ·FAQ and HowTo gone
- ·Product and service
What structured data does and does not give you
Structured data (usually JSON-LD in the <head>) tells Google explicitly what a page is: a product, a service, an organisation, a review, an article. It does not change rankings. It can, however, change whether a page *renders* as a rich result, e.g. a product with price and rating stars, a service with an area served, or breadcrumbs. That is the whole prize: a decorated SERP entry the stripped alternative does not get.
The rule of thumb that has survived every deprecation cycle: markup a page for the thing the page actually is, not for the thing you hope SEs will display. If the page is a service page, Service schema fits; if it is a product page, Product. Google rewards accurate, minimal, parseable JSON-LD, and penalizes the "add every rich type to one page" spamming that used to pass.
The famous removals: FAQ and HowTo
Google formally removed FAQ rich results from Search in May 2026, and HowTo rich results were removed from Search earlier (the HowTo documentation was retired; it no longer displays results on desktop or mobile). The FAQ withdrawal also ended the narrow eligibility that government and health sites held.
That means two current facts:
- FAQPage markup no longer produces a rich result for the general web. FAQPage is still a valid Schema.org type, and Google still parses Q&A in markup to understand the page, but there is no visible FAQ rich-result treatment anymore.
- HowTo markup is not a rich-result surface either. It was used for recipe-like steps, and that display is gone.
The practical advice: keep FAQ-type content on the page for users, keep it marked up if your site's CMS generates it (it is harmless and still gives Google the Q&A structure), but do not treat FAQ or HowTo as a rich-result strategy. For "can I still get this feature?" questions the Search Console eligibility guidance is the honest source, and the safe test is markup + Google > Rich Results test.
What still works (and when it applies)
| Type | What it shows | Good fit |
|---|---|---|
Product (with Offer, aggregateRating, review) | Price, rating, availability, image | E-commerce product page |
Service | Name, area served, price range, provider | Service page (a painting service, a law firm) |
LocalBusiness and subclasses (e.g. ProfessionalService) | Address, hours, area, geo | Store / office location page |
Article | Author, date, publication | Editorial/blog content (long-standing, reliable) |
BreadcrumbList | Breadcrumb nav path | Category hierarchies |
VideoObject | thumbnail, description, duration | Video page |
FAQPage / HowTo | -- (no rich display now) | Only for clarity/Q&A parsing, not rich results |
The headline distinction today is Product and Service vs everything else: Product is where the SERP treats e-commerce seriously (price, rating, review), Service is where local/business pages signal what they offer. Both belong in the technical SEO canon.
Product markup you can copy
The minimum Product JSON-LD that is accurate:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Product",
"name": "CSMBAC website audit",
"description": "A 30-minute page-speed and indexing audit.",
"image": "https://example.com/audit.jpg",
"offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"price": "199.00",
"priceCurrency": "GBP",
"availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
}
}Only add review/aggregateRating if the review data is real and on-page; Google strips rating markup without a matching review. The ecommerce SEO article covers the product-page architecture around it.
Service markup in one block
For a service page:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Service",
"name": "WordPress hosting migration",
"areaServed": { "@type": "Country", "name": "GB" },
"provider": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Acme Ltd" },
"serviceType": "Web hosting migration",
"description": "Move your WordPress site to Acme hosting with no downtime."
}Pair it with LocalBusiness/Organization when there is an office and hours; the LocalBusiness sites article (head tags) is where you also drop organizational Organization schema.
The one-schema-per-page rule and validation
Clutter is the enemy. One page, one primary entity Product or Service; secondary types only where they are genuinely on the page (breadcrumbs, article). Validate every deploy with Google's Rich Results Test and Search Console's URL inspection "Test live URL" view, covered by the indexing analysis workflow.
Prevention
Keep the deployment-capable mental model: markup reflects the visible page, review data must be real, and a live change to a schema should be re-tested in the Rich Results Test before production. If a redesign drops a page, drop the structure with it.
When schema is not the priority
Do not spend a day on JSON-LD while the page is 3 MB of unrendered content. Schema enhances an already-indexable page. The priority chain that matters is: canonicalization, crawlability and robots.txt, and performance come before schema, and the structured data this family describes is a polish on that base.