How to Add Organization Schema Markup to Your Website

What are Organization Schema Markup?

Organization schema markup is a type of structured data you can add to your website's HTML code to provide key information of your organization to Google and other search engines.

This helps them connect and collect entities such as logos, social media profiles and contact information for your business, and shapes Google's Knowledge Graph - visual representation of your information in a infobox on the right hand side in search results.

According to BuiltWith (date: 22/02/2023), approximately 26% of top 1 million websites use Organization Schema Markup globally, and it's one of the most common structured data types used on websites.

Organization schema markup usage globally

Much of this has to do with a few CMS such as Wordpress publishing it by default.

What Types of Organization Schema Should You Use?

While many websites already have some organization markup on their business, there's plenty to be improved.

One of the most obvious updates you should do is to make sure you use the correct organization type. There's over 100 subtypes of Organization, but the top-level options are:

Airline
Consortium
Corporation
EducationalOrganization
FundingScheme
GovernmentOrganization
LibrarySystem
LocalBusiness
MedicalOrganization
NGO
NewsMediaOrganization
OnlineBusiness
PerformingGroup
Project
ResearchOrganization
SearchRescueOrganization
SportsOrganization
WorkersUnion

Note: LocalBusiness Schema Markup is especially handy (and popular) because it's made to differentiate a business for local searchers.

Local Business is a subtype from Organization and Place, and it inherits their properties. It exists so a restaurant owner or retailer can stand out from competitors in the same area, and is vital component for local SEO.

However, it's important to choose a type that fits your organization and provide the following information as a bare minimum:

The type of company
The company name
Official website
Address
The official logo
The preferred description
The social accounts
The unique identifying URL
Are there other val

This is how I would add structured data for metamanager: JSON-LD example:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "OnlineBusiness",
  "name": "metamanager",
  "description": "SEO optimize your website from metamanager...",
  "image": "...",
  "url": "https://metamanager.io/",
  "logo": "https://metamanager.io/logo/metamanager-logo-dark-sm.png",
  "telephone": 0123456789,
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.facebook.com/metamanagerSEO", 
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/metamanager/"
  ],
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "...",
    "addressLocality": "Oslo",
    "postalCode": "0000",
    "addressCountry": "Norway",
  },
}

Are Organization Schema Markup Important?

Google recommend companies to take ownership to their own data, as mentioned in their documentation about business information in search results.

Besides providing correct and better on-point information, the rich result Infobox takes a lot of space in search results and makes your business really stand out when it's showing.

How to Add Organization Schema Markup?

Structured data for organizations can be deployed to your website in 3 steps:

Make sure page content meets Google's guidelines for organization schema
Create JSON-LD markup code with business information
Add organization markup to “About”, "Home" or other relevant page

Step 1: Make Sure Page Content Meets Google's Guidelines for Organization Schema

Organization schema needs to follow Google's General structured data guidelines, and Carousel guidelines if applicable (typically for restaurants).

It can be summarized as:

Only use up-to-date information
Use original content either you or your users have made
Don't mark up information not visible on the page
No fake, misleading or misleading content
Do not impersonate any person or organization
No prohibited or regulated goods, services or information

Guidelines for Carousel are more specific, and is applicable for structured data within a list using the "ItemList" property.

Carousel snippet is usually shown for these types:

Course
Movie
Recipe
Restaurant

Which can be very powerful in search result pages:

Organization schema is often nested in these types, as this case show:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "ItemList",
  "itemListElement": [
    {
      "@type": "ListItem",
      "position": 1,
      "item": {
        "@type": "Course",
        "url":"https://www.example.com/courses#intro-to-cs",
        "name": "Introduction to Computer Science and Programming",
        "description": "This is an introductory CS course...",
        "provider": {
          "@type": "Organization",
          "name": "University of Technology - Example",
          "sameAs": "https://www.example.com"
        }
      }
    },
    {... other ListItems}
  ]
}

That can produce a rich feature like this:

Restaurant and Course has their own guidelines such as "no promotional phrases" or "no prices in titles". We recommend reading each specific documentation for your usage.

Step 2: Create JSON-LD Markup Code With Organization Information

There's a lot of attributes that can be used, and all of them are relevant for Google and Bing one way or another, but there's certain information that are required for enabling rich results:

Legal name, address and official website.
Images, logo, description to be shown in an Infobox.
Who you are and create credibility through third-party confirmation in the “sameAs” field (Wikipedia, social media accounts, etc.).

Recommendation: Only add to one page, not all pages. We recommend adding Organization markup to the most relevant page for this information, such as "About" og "Home", as long as this information is visible.

Then it's the format. Most common structured data formats are: Microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD. Google recommend JSON-LD markup:

We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new structured data that are kind of come out for JSON-LD first. So that's what we prefer.

- John Mueller (Google Search Advocate)

Recommendation: Use JSON-LD format.

Step 3: Add Organization Markup to Your Page

Schemas can be deployed in primarily 3 different ways:

Directly in your site's HTML
Through a plugin
With a third party solution

Directly in Your Site's HTML

Add your schema markup code inside a script tag. This tag is then added to either the head or body section of your HTML.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Your About us page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <script type="application/ld+json">
      {
      "@context": "https://schema.org/",
      "@type": "Organization",
      {YOUR ORGANIZATION STRUCTURED DATA}
      }
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

Warning: Only add the markup once on your website.

Through a Plugin

If you're using content management system (CMS) chances are that they already have created a business schema markup for you. If not, there's always a few plugins for deploying it.

Five Star Business Profile and Schema is pretty neat plugin that does add schema markup for business pages.

With a Third Party Solution

metamanager is a solid solution to publish all organization and business markups.

It's a SaaS solution for SEO that specialize in on-page SEO optimization, and one of the features is publishing structured data. It supports all schema markup types, herein Organization and LocalBusiness.

You can deploy it in two steps: Step 1: Connect website to metamanager and get a full overview of your URLs and their traffic insight:

Step 2: Add business information, and click to publish: