Schema markup is one of those things a web developer mentions, everyone nods, and nobody checks whether it's there. For a manufacturer or a supplier, it's worth checking. It's one of the cheaper ways to help search engines understand what you make, and it takes a developer a day or two, not a rebuild.
It's also oversold. Structured data won't make a weak page rank, and a lot of the rich results people promise from it are no longer shown to most sites. This checklist covers what's worth adding, what Google actually does with it, and what to leave out.
What is schema markup?
Schema markup, also called structured data, is a block of code on a page that states facts about it in a format search engines read reliably: this page is a product, it's made by this company, it belongs in this category. The vocabulary comes from schema.org, and Google recommends writing it as JSON-LD, a script block that sits in the page without changing what visitors see.
Google's introduction to structured data explains it as a way to give "explicit clues about the meaning of a page". Your product page already says what the product is. Schema says it in a form a machine doesn't have to guess at.
What schema should a manufacturer's website have?
Five types cover almost every manufacturing and supplier site:
| Type | Where it goes | What it tells search engines |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Every page, once | Who you are: name, logo, address, contact details, profiles |
| BreadcrumbList | Every page below the homepage | Where the page sits in your site |
| Product | Each product or product family page | What the product is, and who makes it |
| Article | Blog posts and guides | Headline, author, publish and update dates |
| FAQPage | Pages with a real list of questions and answers | The questions and their answers |
Some sites need one or two more. If buyers visit a showroom or a trade counter, LocalBusiness markup with opening hours makes sense. If you publish case studies, CreativeWork is a reasonable fit. Most sites don't need anything beyond the five.
Organization: who you are
Put it on every page, usually in the site-wide template. Google's Organization documentation says it helps Google "better understand your organization's administrative details and disambiguate your organization in search results."
There are no required properties. The ones worth filling in:
name, exactly as it appears everywhere elseurlandlogoaddress, if you have a real one buyers can visit or ship totelephoneandemailsameAs, with links to your LinkedIn page and directory profilesdescription, one or two plain sentences about what you make
Keep these facts identical to your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn page and directory listings. Search engines and AI tools compare sources, and a mismatch weakens all of them.
BreadcrumbList: where the page sits
Breadcrumbs describe the path from your homepage to the page: Home, then Products, then Corrugated boxes, then Mailer boxes. Google can show that path in search results instead of a raw URL, which reads better and hints at the size of your range. See Google's breadcrumb documentation.
It works best when the same breadcrumb trail is also visible at the top of the page. That helps visitors too.
Product: what you make
This is the one that matters most for a manufacturer, and the one most often misunderstood.
Product markup describes a product: its name, a description, an image, the brand or manufacturer, a model or part number, and the category. Adding that to every product page gives search engines a clear statement of what each page is about.
Where people get caught out is rich results. Google's
product snippet documentation
says product snippets need a name plus at least one of review,
aggregateRating or offers. Most manufacturers sell on quote, with
no public price and no reviews on the page. That's fine. The markup is
still valid and still useful. It just won't earn the stars or price
line under your listing, and you shouldn't invent a price or a rating
to get them.
A simple product page might carry something like this:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Product",
"name": "Custom printed mailer boxes",
"description": "E-flute corrugated mailer boxes, printed in up to four colors, from 250 units.",
"image": "https://www.example.com/images/mailer-boxes.jpg",
"brand": { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Example Packaging" },
"manufacturer": { "@id": "https://www.example.com/#organization" },
"category": "Corrugated packaging"
}
Everything in it is also written on the page. That's the rule for all structured data, covered below.
Article: blog posts and guides
If you publish guides, buying advice or technical articles, mark each one up as an Article with the headline, the author, the date published and the date last updated. The update date matters: when you refresh a guide, change it, so search engines can see the page is maintained.
FAQPage: useful, but not for the reason it used to be
For years, FAQ markup was an easy way to take up extra space in search results. That ended in August 2023, when Google limited FAQ rich results to well-known government and health websites. Most businesses no longer get them.
It's still worth adding to pages that genuinely answer a list of questions, like a quote FAQ or a materials guide. It describes the page accurately, and a page built from clear questions and direct answers is exactly what search engines and AI tools quote. Just don't add a block of questions to every page for the markup's sake.
The same update also phased out HowTo rich results, so step-by-step markup for things like installation guides no longer earns anything special in Google.
What should you leave out?
Google's structured data guidelines are strict about one thing above all: markup has to describe content visitors can see on the page. A few common mistakes break that rule.
- Reviews or ratings that aren't on the page, or that you wrote yourself. This can earn a manual action, which removes your rich results entirely.
- Prices you don't actually offer. If you sell on quote, leave
offersout. - Facts that contradict the page, such as a different company name, phone number or address in the markup.
- Markup for things that aren't there, like FAQ markup on a page with no questions on it.
When in doubt, the test is simple: could a visitor find this exact fact on the page? If not, it doesn't belong in the markup.
How do you test schema markup?
Test each page template, not just the homepage. A product template that's wrong is wrong on every product page.
- Paste a URL into Google's Rich Results Test. It shows which rich results the page is eligible for and flags errors.
- Run the same URL through the Schema Markup Validator, which checks everything against schema.org, including types Google doesn't use for rich results.
- After launch, check the enhancement reports in Google Search Console. They list pages with errors across the whole site, which catches problems in pages you didn't test by hand.
Treat errors as must-fix. Warnings often mean a recommended field is missing, which is fine if you don't have that information.
A checklist you can run today
- Is Organization markup on every page, with your logo, address and profiles?
- Do the name, phone and address in it match your Google and LinkedIn listings exactly?
- Does every inner page have a breadcrumb, visible and marked up?
- Does every product page have Product markup with a name, description, image and manufacturer?
- Is every fact in the markup also visible on the page?
- Are there no invented prices, ratings or reviews?
- Have you run one page of each template through the Rich Results Test?
Schema works best on top of pages that already say the right things. If your specs are still in PDFs, start with our guide to spec sheets and product pages. For how we build manufacturing sites with this in place from day one, see our pages for manufacturers and suppliers and packaging companies, or our SEO service.