Many site owners wonder whether they should describe their company with Organization or with LocalBusiness. Both come from schema.org and both can carry a name, a logo and contact details, so the choice is not obvious. This guide explains the difference and gives a simple rule to decide.
How the two types are related
LocalBusiness is a more specific kind of Organization. Everything you can say about an Organization you can also say about a LocalBusiness, and the latter adds properties tied to a physical place: an address, opening hours, a price range and a map location. You can read how the hierarchy works in the most important schema.org types and how they connect.
When to use Organization
- Your company works online or serves customers in many places.
- You are a software company, an agency, a publisher or an association with no shop that people visit.
- You want to describe the entity behind a website, with its official profiles and logo.
The free Organization schema generator covers this case and lets you add profile links through the sameAs property, as explained in the sameAs property explained.
When to use LocalBusiness
- You have a place customers can visit, such as a restaurant, a clinic or a workshop.
- Opening hours and a street address are important to your customers.
- You want to be found for searches that include a place name.
Inside LocalBusiness there are many sub-types, such as Restaurant, Dentist or Store. Choose the most specific one that really describes the business.
Can you use both?
Yes, when the company has a head office and separate local branches. The company is described once as an Organization, and each location is a LocalBusiness that points to it through the parentOrganization property. To connect the blocks without repeating data, use identifiers, as shown in linked schema markup with @id. What you should avoid is publishing two competing descriptions of the same business with different names or addresses.
A quick rule
- No place customers visit: Organization.
- One place customers visit: LocalBusiness, or a specific sub-type.
- Head office plus branches: Organization for the company and LocalBusiness for each branch.
Whatever you choose, place the markup on your entity home, described in what is a Google entity home, and check it with the schema markup validator.