JSON-LD, in plain English

The luggage tag

Imagine a suitcase with no tag. A handler can describe it — black, wheels, a strap — but cannot know whose it is or where it is going. Put a tag on it with a name, a destination and a flight number and it routes itself.

Your web page is the suitcase. JSON-LD is the tag. It says, in a fixed vocabulary that every large search engine and AI assistant already understands: the thing on this page is a LocalBusiness; its name is this; its telephone is this; its address is this.

What it looks like

It sits in the page source, inside a script tag, and reads like a list of labelled facts:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Example Plumbing",
  "telephone": "+61 3 6257 1300",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "12 Example Street",
    "addressLocality": "St Helens",
    "addressRegion": "TAS",
    "postalCode": "7216"
  }
}
</script>

That is the whole idea. The vocabulary — @type, telephone, address — comes from schema.org, a shared dictionary maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. You are not inventing field names. You are using theirs.

What it is not

• It is not visible content. It should describe what is already on the page. Marking up a phone number the page does not show is how sites get penalised.
• It is not a ranking trick. It is comprehension. It helps a machine quote you correctly; it does not lift you above a competitor with better content.
• It is not something your designer necessarily knows. Many small-business sites are built from a theme, and themes often ship a partial block that was never filled in — or none at all.
• It is not a guarantee of anything. Google may ignore it. ChatGPT may never visit. It removes one reason to be misunderstood; it does not create demand.

How to check your own site in two minutes

1. Open your homepage in a desktop browser.
2. Right-click and choose View page source.
3. Press Ctrl+F and search for application/ld+json.

No results means no structured data at all. One result with a name and address means you are ahead of most. A result that says something like "@type": "WebSite" and nothing else means the tag is there but says nothing useful about the business.

What we found in Tasmania

Across the 1,045 Tasmanian business websites we checked, 304 have no JSON-LD whatsoever — 29% of the sample. Of the 741 that do, only 266 include a telephone number and only 280 include an address. In other words, roughly half the sites that bothered to add a tag left out the two facts a customer actually needs.

The next step

If the search finds nothing, the fix is five fields, copy and paste. If you would rather someone else did it, the audit is free and lists exactly what your page is missing.