Google reads your page and tries to work out what is on it. Sometimes it gets there. Often it doesn't.
Structured data is how you stop it guessing. It's a block of code no visitor ever sees, and in it you write down in plain terms: this is a business, this is the address, these are the opening hours, this is a product, it costs this much, and this is the answer to that question.
What it actually looks like
The vocabulary is called schema.org and it's shared by Google, Bing and the rest. The format Google recommends is JSON-LD: a block of code placed in the page, separate from the text a human reads.
That separation matters more than it sounds. The other two formats, microdata and RDFa, weave through the HTML, so any change to how the page looks risks breaking the markup. With JSON-LD the markup sits in one place, you read it like a document and you fix it without touching the design.
What you actually get
A Google result is no longer just a title and two lines of text. It can show the price, the availability, the opening hours, a breadcrumb trail instead of the web address.
You take up more room on screen and you hand over more information before the click. On a phone, where three or four results fit on screen, that difference is large.
One thing I have to say up front, because the Romanian guides are full of expired advice: in August 2023 Google severely cut back two types of result. Frequently asked questions no longer appear expanded under the link, except for large, recognised government and health sites. Step-by-step instructions disappeared entirely. If you're reading an article that promises you FAQ markup and accordions in Google, that article was written before 2023.
That doesn't make the markup useless. It means you no longer add it for looks, you add it so it gets read correctly. I'll come back to that.
What it looks like on a real site
On a psychotherapy practice's site I put a set of sixteen interlinked statements on the home page. The ones that matter:
- The business is declared at once as a local business, a medical provider and a professional service, because it is all three, and Google treats each category differently.
- The therapist is declared as a person, with the credentials placed in a field made for certifications. It doesn't just say “accredited psychologist” in the text. The licence number sits somewhere it can be checked.
- Each service page is declared as a medical service, not a generic one.
On a scaffolding manufacturer's catalogue it's a different situation and different statements. Each product is declared as a product, with brand, category and offer. The company carries a full postal address, the opening hours across seven days and the year it was founded. And the starting price is written into the page description as well, so it turns up straight in the Google result: “From 360 EUR + VAT”.
In a market where everyone else writes “ask for a quote”, the person searching sees a price before they click. That's the client who rings already knowing whether they can afford it.
What's worth adding, by type of site
Any business with a physical address needs the local business statement, with address, phone, opening hours and the area served. That's the minimum and it's missing from most sites in Romania.
A services site wants one service statement per page. If your services fall into a special category, such as medical, legal or financial, use the specific category, not the general one. Google treats a medical practice differently from a cleaning firm, and rightly so.
An online shop needs product with price, availability and currency, on every product page. Here the absence costs you directly, because without them you don't get into the rich results your competition is already in.
A blog wants article with author and date. Simple, and skipped often.
And breadcrumbs everyone wants. It's the cheapest markup and one of the most visible, because it turns the ugly address under the title into a readable path.
How to check your own markup
There are three tools and they do different things. Confusing them is why people think they got something wrong when they didn't.
Google's Rich Results Test tells you one thing: whether your markup is eligible for a display type Google actually has. It doesn't validate all of your markup. If you've written a correct statement that Google has no special display for, the test won't mention it at all. That isn't an error.
The schema.org validator checks the markup itself, regardless of what Google displays. You use it when you want to know whether you wrote it correctly, not whether Google gives you an accordion.
Search Console shows you what Google found on your real site, on its last pass, plus the errors. It's the only one of the three that tells you what is actually happening, because the other two test a page, not the site.
The practical order: you write the markup, you run it through the schema.org validator so it's syntactically correct, you run it through Google's test to see what you're eligible for, then you wait and watch Search Console.
How long before it shows
It depends on how often Google comes round, so anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. For a new or rarely updated site it can take longer.
And so nobody sells you illusions: rich results are never guaranteed. Correct markup makes you eligible. Whether Google chooses to show it, on which query and on which device, is its decision. Anyone who promises you otherwise either doesn't know or is lying to you.
The mistakes I see often
Reviews marked up on your own site. You put the stars in the code, you wait for them to show in Google, they never do. Google doesn't display stars for reviews a business declares about itself. It breaks nothing, but it produces nothing, and you think you've ticked a box.
Statements that don't match the page. You write one price in one place and another in the code, or you declare frequently asked questions that appear nowhere on the page. Google checks this and, when it doesn't match, ignores the whole set. That's worse than having nothing.
Added once and forgotten. You change the prices, you change the opening hours, you forget the code. A year on, you're declaring things that are false. Checking them is part of the website audit, precisely because nobody looks in there of their own accord.
The part that matters more and more: AI assistants
This is the reason FAQ markup is still worth adding, even though it no longer produces accordions in Google.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini about a supplier, a block of questions and answers declared as such is far easier to read correctly than three paragraphs of marketing with the answer buried in the middle. Same with a business declared with address, opening hours and services: hard to get wrong.
Nobody guarantees you'll be recommended. Nobody has the list of factors, not even the people building the models. But the difference between “could be misread” and “barely can be” is exactly what the markup does, and you pay for it once.
It isn't magic
Structured data doesn't lift you up the rankings on its own. It does something else: it makes sure what you already have is understood correctly and displayed in full.
If your content is poor, structured data will describe it faithfully as poor. The right order is good content first, which is what SEO content is about, and only then the technical wrapper that makes it legible to machines.
If you already have good content and you don't have this, you're leaving money on the table. It's the kind of thing you do once, properly, and it works in the background for years.
That's what I do under technical SEO. If you want to know first what you've got and what you're missing, write to me and I'll take a look at the site.