By Mehdi HassanSchema.org lists hundreds of types, and SEO plugins will happily add a dozen to every page. Most of it does nothing. For a startup or SaaS marketing site, a short set of accurate structured data does the useful work: it tells Google and other systems who the company is, what it sells and how pages relate.
This guide covers the six types worth adding, what each one does, the properties to fill in and where the rich-result rules have changed. It's part of our technical SEO guide for marketing websites. If you want the definitions first, start with what schema markup is.
Which schema markup should a marketing website use?
A marketing website should use Organization, WebSite, Article and BreadcrumbList as its foundation, add SoftwareApplication or Product where it sells something, and add FAQPage only on pages with a visible FAQ. That's the whole list for most sites.
Schema type | Where it goes | What it tells search engines |
|---|---|---|
Organization | Home page (or sitewide) | Company name, logo, URL and official profiles |
WebSite | Home page | The site's name, used for the site name shown in Google |
SoftwareApplication or Product | Product or pricing page | What you sell, category and offers |
Article or BlogPosting | Each blog post | Headline, author, dates and publisher |
BreadcrumbList | Pages below the top level | Where the page sits in the site hierarchy |
FAQPage | Pages with a visible FAQ | Question and answer pairs on the page |
Types like LocalBusiness, Event, Review or HowTo only make sense when you genuinely have that content. A SaaS company with no physical location gains nothing from LocalBusiness, and self-written review markup can break Google's guidelines.
What does schema markup for websites actually do?
Schema markup makes a page's facts explicit and machine-readable. It helps search engines connect your pages to the right entity, can make pages eligible for certain rich results and reduces guesswork about authors, dates and products. It doesn't make a page rank by itself.
The honest version matters, because schema is often sold as a shortcut. Ahrefs ran a controlled test in 2026 and found no significant lift in AI citations from adding schema, and Google says its AI features need no special markup. What schema does reliably is keep your structured facts consistent: the same company name, logo and profiles everywhere. That consistency supports entity SEO, which is how search engines and language models learn who you are.
Pros
- Clarifies company, author, product and page hierarchy for search engines.
- Can enable rich results such as breadcrumbs, article details and product info.
- Controls the site name Google displays through WebSite markup.
- Cheap to add once at the template level.
Cons
- No measured AI citation lift in Ahrefs' 2026 test.
- Rich results are never guaranteed, and Google has removed or narrowed several types.
- Inaccurate or hidden-content markup can trigger manual actions.
- Hand-written schema drifts out of date when content changes.
How should you set up Organization and WebSite schema?
Set up Organization and WebSite schema once, on the home page, and keep them identical to how your company appears elsewhere. Organization names the company and links its official profiles; WebSite names the site so Google can show the right site name in results.
- Organization: name, url, logo (a square or wide image you control), sameAs links to official profiles such as LinkedIn, X, GitHub and Crunchbase, and contact details if public.
- WebSite: name, alternateName if people search for an abbreviation, and url. Google's site-name documentation uses this to pick the name shown above your listing.
- Consistency: use the same company name and logo in schema, page titles, social profiles and your Google Business Profile if you have one.
Should a SaaS site use SoftwareApplication or Product schema?
A SaaS site should usually use SoftwareApplication on its main product or pricing page, because it describes software directly with properties like applicationCategory and operatingSystem. Product suits physical goods and ecommerce, where Google's merchant features apply.
Fill in only what you can state truthfully: name, description, applicationCategory, operatingSystem (Web is fine for a browser app) and offers with real prices if your pricing is public. Leave out aggregateRating unless the ratings come from genuine, verifiable reviews shown on the page. Google's documentation is strict about rating markup, and invented numbers are a guideline violation. Lean products and indie tools can stop there; our guide to micro-SaaS websites covers what else a small product site needs.
The properties we fill in for a typical SaaS pricing page
On a typical SaaS pricing page we output one SoftwareApplication block as JSON-LD in the server-rendered HTML.
We set name, description, url, applicationCategory (for example BusinessApplication), operatingSystem set to Web, and publisher pointing to the Organization by its id. Under offers we list each public plan with name, price and priceCurrency, pulled from the same CMS fields that render the visible pricing table, so the two can't disagree.
We skip aggregateRating unless real reviews appear on the page, and we skip any property we'd have to guess.
How do Article and BreadcrumbList schema help a blog?
Article schema tells search engines who wrote a post, when it was published and updated, and who published it. BreadcrumbList describes where a page sits in your hierarchy. Together they make blog content easier to attribute and to place within the site.
For Article, include headline, datePublished, dateModified, author as a Person with a url to a real author page, image and publisher referencing your Organization. Keep dateModified honest: change it when content meaningfully changes, not on every deploy. For BreadcrumbList, mirror the visible breadcrumb trail exactly. Breadcrumbs also reinforce your internal linking structure, since each step is a real link to a parent page.
Is FAQ schema still worth adding?
FAQ schema is still worth adding where a visible FAQ exists, but not for rich results. Google now shows FAQ rich results only for a limited set of well-known, authoritative government and health sites, so most companies won't get the expandable snippet.
It remains useful as accurate labelling of question and answer content, which is the format answer engines tend to quote. The visible FAQ is what matters: real buyer questions, answered directly in the page copy. Our guide to FAQ sections that earn citations covers how to write them. HowTo rich results have been removed entirely, so HowTo markup is no longer worth the effort for most sites.
How do you implement and validate schema?
Implement schema as JSON-LD in the server-rendered HTML, generated from templates and CMS fields, then validate each template with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator. Check once per template, not once per page.
Decide types per template
Map each page template to its schema types: home, product, pricing, blog post, nested pages and FAQ pages.
Generate from data
Build JSON-LD from the same fields that render the page, such as title, author, dates and prices, so markup can't drift from content.
Render on the server
Output schema in the initial HTML, not via a client script, so every crawler receives it.
Validate each template
Test one URL per template in the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator and fix errors and warnings that matter.
Monitor in Search Console
Check the enhancements reports for errors after launch and after template changes.
On Webflow and Framer, you can add JSON-LD in page or CMS template custom code, using CMS fields for dynamic values. On Next.js, render it in a script tag of type application/ld+json from the page component. Schema also shows up as a line item in most audits; our SEO audit checklist includes it. For the research on whether markup changes AI visibility, see does schema help AI citations.
