Research · Auto repair
Markup that forgets the business
Structured data is a short summary of a page written for machines rather than people. Half the auto repair homepages that have one never use it to say who the business is.
Half describe only the page, never the business on it.
We have already counted how many sites have no structured data at all. This is the quieter problem underneath that one: the summary exists, a plugin or theme put it there, and it says the page is a page. It never mentions the name over the door, the address, or when you are open.
What the difference looks like
Markup that describes a business type such as AutoRepair carries the things a customer wants: the trading name, the street address, the phone number, the opening hours. Markup that only says WebSite or WebPage carries none of that. A further 817 homepages named a company but nothing about a place you can drive to.
Counted against every homepage we checked rather than only those with markup, 1,903 of 6,522 described the business. That is fewer than three in ten.
How we got these numbers
We read the structured data on the homepages of websites belonging to businesses categorized as auto repair, using the latest result for each site and counting every website once.
Of 6,522 homepages checked, 3,788 carried structured data, and those are the ones counted here. We recorded every type present on the page, then asked whether any of them was a business type such as LocalBusiness or AutoRepair.
An honest limitation: these are the businesses we chose to analyze, not a random sample of the industry. A business type outside the list we checked for would count as page-only markup, so 50% is a ceiling on the problem rather than a floor. Having the right type also does not prove the details inside it are accurate.
What to do about it
- Ask what type your homepage declares. Whoever maintains the site can answer this in a minute.
- Aim for the specific one. AutoRepair says more than LocalBusiness, which says more than Organization.
- Fill in the parts that matter. Name, address, phone, and opening hours are the ones customers act on.
- Keep it matching. The details here should agree exactly with your Google profile.