Schema Markup Generator

What Is Schema Markup?

Schema markup is a small block of code that describes your page in a language search engines already understand. The words on the page tell a reader what they are looking at. The markup tells a crawler the same thing in plain data: this string is the headline, this date is when the article was published, this address belongs to a shop that opens at eight.

The vocabulary comes from schema.org, a shared project maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. The format most sites use today is JSON-LD, a block of JSON placed inside a script tag. It sits apart from your visible HTML, which means you can add it, edit it or remove it without touching your layout. That separation is exactly why this schema markup generator produces JSON-LD rather than microdata.

Why Structured Data Matters for a Small Site

Structured data is not a ranking factor on its own. Adding a block of JSON-LD will not push a page up the results by itself. What it does is remove guesswork. When a crawler has to infer the author, the publication date or the opening hours from the page text, it sometimes gets it wrong. When the markup states those facts outright, it usually gets it right.

The second benefit is eligibility. Some search features only appear for pages that carry the right markup: breadcrumb trails in place of a bare URL, review stars, event dates, recipe times, business hours in a knowledge panel. You are not guaranteed any of them, but without the markup you are not even in the running. Once your snippet does change, the SERP Preview Tool is a quick way to see how the title and description you wrote will sit alongside it.

The third benefit is quieter and matters more every year. Search engines and AI answer systems build entity graphs — connected records of people, organisations, places and works. Structured data feeds those graphs directly. A small business that clearly declares its name, address and phone number in machine-readable form is much easier to represent accurately than one that leaves the information in an image on the contact page.

The Schema Types This Generator Covers

Article and BlogPosting

Use this for anything editorial: blog posts, guides, news write-ups. The headline should match the visible H1 on the page, and if those two drift apart you have a mismatch worth fixing — the Heading Tag Checker will show you what heading the page actually renders. Fill in the author, the publisher and both dates. Search engines use dateModified to judge freshness, so update it honestly when you genuinely revise a post rather than on every deploy.

FAQPage

FAQPage markup describes a list of questions and their answers. Be aware of one change: since 2023 Google has shown FAQ rich results only for well-known government and health sites, so most sites will not see the expandable questions in the results any more. The markup is still worth adding, because it states plainly what your page answers, and that clarity helps both classic search and AI-generated answers. Just do not add it expecting an instant visual upgrade.

BreadcrumbList

Breadcrumb markup describes the path from your home page to the current page. Google frequently replaces the raw URL in a search result with this trail, which makes the listing easier to read on mobile. Two rules matter: the trail must match the navigation a visitor can actually see, and the steps must be in order, starting at the top of the hierarchy.

LocalBusiness

This one is for anyone with a physical location or a defined service area. Name, full postal address, telephone number and opening hours are the core. The single most important habit here is consistency: the details in your markup should match your Google Business Profile and your contact page character for character. Mismatched addresses across sources are a well-known cause of local visibility problems.

How to Use the Schema Markup Generator

1. Pick the schema type that matches the page you are marking up. One page usually needs one primary type, plus a breadcrumb.
2. Fill in the fields. The Example button loads a filled-in sample for the selected type if you want to see the shape of a finished block first.
3. Read the Checks panel. Errors are things that will make the markup invalid or ignored. Warnings are recommended properties that are missing.
4. Copy the generated code, or download it as a text file to hand to a developer.
5. Paste the whole block, script tag included, into the page it describes, then test it with Google's Rich Results Test.

Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The page holds no data after you close the tab, so you can safely paste client details into it.

Where to Put the Code

Paste the block inside the <head> of the page. It also works in the <body>, which is useful when your CMS only lets you edit post content, but the head is tidier and is read sooner. In WordPress, most SEO plugins offer a header scripts field, or you can use a code block. In Shopify it goes in the relevant theme template.

Two rules save most of the trouble people run into. First, the markup must live on the page it describes — article markup for a post belongs on that post, not on the home page. Second, the URLs inside the markup should be the canonical versions of those pages. If the @id in your article markup points at a URL that canonicalises somewhere else, you are sending mixed signals; the Canonical URL Checker will confirm which URL your page actually declares as the master copy.

You can place more than one JSON-LD block on a page — an Article block plus a BreadcrumbList block is a completely normal pairing. What you should not do is describe the same thing twice with two conflicting blocks, which is a common side effect of an SEO plugin adding markup that you then add again by hand.

Required Versus Recommended Properties

Every schema type has properties that are required for the markup to be valid at all, and a longer list of recommended ones that decide whether a search feature will actually appear. The generator marks required fields and flags empty recommended ones in the Checks panel.

• Article: the headline is essential. Image, author, datePublished and publisher are recommended, and in practice an article with no image and no author rarely earns anything extra.
• FAQPage: each entry needs a question and an accepted answer. Answers may contain basic HTML such as links and lists, but not scripts or full layouts.
• BreadcrumbList: each step needs a position and a name. Every step except the last should also carry a URL.
• LocalBusiness: the name is required. Address, telephone, opening hours, price range and geographic coordinates are all recommended and all easy to supply.

Common Schema Markup Mistakes

Marking Up Content That Is Not On The Page

This is the rule that gets sites into real trouble. Structured data must describe content a visitor can actually see. Adding review stars for reviews that do not exist, or FAQ entries that appear nowhere on the page, is a spam policy violation and can trigger a manual action against the whole site.

Using Relative URLs

Inside JSON-LD, every URL must be absolute — the full https://example.com/page form. A relative path like /page has no meaning to a parser reading the block in isolation. The generator flags this as an error for exactly that reason.

Broken JSON

A single stray comma or an unescaped quote inside a text value invalidates the whole block, and a broken block is skipped silently. Generating the JSON rather than typing it by hand removes most of this risk, but if you edit the code afterwards, re-test it.

Wrong Date Formats

Dates should be in ISO 8601 form, which means 2026-05-12 rather than 12 May 2026. The date fields in this tool produce that format automatically.

Forgetting the Markup After a Redesign

Markup that pointed at valid URLs a year ago may now point at pages that redirect or no longer exist. After a site migration, re-check both the markup and the URLs inside it, and make sure the pages it references are still listed in the sitemap you publish — the XML Sitemap Generator is a fast way to rebuild that list.

How to Test Your Structured Data

Three checks cover almost everything. Google's Rich Results Test tells you whether a page is eligible for a specific search feature and which properties are missing. The Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org checks the markup against the schema.org vocabulary itself, which is the better tool when you are using a type Google does not build features from. Finally, the Enhancements section of Google Search Console reports errors across every page it has crawled, which is the only one of the three that shows problems at scale.

All three of those need the markup to be published first. Before it is, paste the block into the Structured Data Validator, which runs in your browser and so works on a draft, a staging site or a template that has not shipped. It catches the faults that stop a block being read at all — invalid JSON, a missing required property, a relative URL, a date in the wrong format — and those are the ones worth clearing before you ask Google anything.

Test one page of each template rather than every page. If your blog post template is correct, every post using it is correct. Re-test after any theme change, plugin update or migration, since those are the moments markup quietly disappears.

Once you have generated the block, the Online HTML Editor is a quick way to drop it into a page and confirm that nothing else in the markup breaks.