Organization schema builder

Telling machines who you are

A person who lands on your home page knows who you are within seconds. The logo is in the corner, the address is in the footer, the social icons lead to your accounts. A search engine has to work all of that out from layout and wording, and it gets it wrong sometimes. It may take a partner’s logo for yours, or pin a namesake’s profile to your name.

Structured data saves it the guessing. You add a small script to the page, one visitors never see, that lists the facts as labeled fields. The labels come from schema.org, a shared vocabulary maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. The format is JSON-LD, which is ordinary JSON with two reserved keys. @context names the vocabulary and @type says what kind of thing you’re describing.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "@id": "https://www.example.org/#organization",
  "name": "Riverside Community Center",
  "url": "https://www.example.org/",
  "logo": "https://www.example.org/logo.png",
  "sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/company/riverside-cc"]
}
</script>

What each part of the form produces

Kind of organization

Becomes @type. The list holds 7 organization types, 14 kinds of LocalBusiness and 2 places. Pick a business type or a place and you also get the opening-hours section, and the logo is copied into image, which local results expect. Museums and places of worship are written as two types, for example ["Museum", "Organization"], so fields such as legalName stay valid.

Names

name is the one people use, legalName the registered one, alternateName an abbreviation or a former name.

Home page URL

Fills url and also builds @id, a permanent identifier (your address followed by #organization) that other structured data on your site can point to.

Profiles

Each line goes into sameAs. That’s how you tell a search engine that this Facebook page, this LinkedIn page or this Wikipedia article is about you.

Address

A PostalAddress object. It’s only written when there’s a street, a city or a postal code.

Phone

Stored in international form. With US or CA as the country, ten digits become +1-503-555-0123. A number you type with + and a country code is kept, with hyphens between the groups.

Hours

Days with identical times are merged into one OpeningHoursSpecification. Two time ranges on the same day describe a midday closing.

Tax ID or charity number

Written as taxID.

Fields you leave empty stay out of the block.

The review list under the code

A missing name is the only thing that counts as an error. Everything else is a warning or a note.

• URL and logo. Both should be complete https:// addresses. A logo address that doesn’t end in an image extension gets a note. A logo hosted on a social network or a file-sharing service gets a warning, because those links expire or turn crawlers away.
• Local business fields. For business and place types, a missing street or city and a missing phone number are warnings. Missing hours only get a note. A day that’s checked but has no times is a warning.
• Formats. A US ZIP code has to be five digits or ZIP+4. The founding date has to be a year or YYYY-MM-DD. Each profile line has to be a full URL. A phone number that can’t be converted is kept exactly as you typed it.

Once the last warning is gone, the label next to the code reads “Good to paste”.

Where the block goes

Paste the block once, on the home page, anywhere in <head> or <body>. Search engines read JSON-LD in either place.

• Hand-written or static sites: paste it into the home page template before </head>.
• WordPress: look in your SEO plugin first. Yoast SEO, Rank Math and SEOPress already output an Organization block from their settings, and two competing blocks confuse more than they help. Use their fields, or switch their output off and add yours with a header-code plugin or a Custom HTML block.
• Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow: each has a “custom code” or “code injection” setting for the home page head.

Then test the live page with the two validators linked under the code. The Rich Results Test tells you what Google could parse. The schema.org validator checks the vocabulary itself.

The block doesn’t update itself. When your hours or phone number change, come back, edit the draft and paste the new version over the old one.