Google Pilot Program

New Google Pilot Program

There is a new Google pilot program that allows local business owners to provide information about their business via schema.org. There are required, recommended and optional properties along with values for the schema.org LocalBusiness class.

By providing this information, a business may be able to generate a prominent Knowledge Panel card with details about the searched-for business, with Place Actions appearing in the card as deep links to provider web landing pages or apps where the action can be completed.

Google has supported the provision of local business information with schema.org since April 2014, but this is the first time they have published prescribed property specifications for LocalBusiness.

This is also the first time they’ve explicitly tied the use of such data to the generation of a dynamic feature in the search engine results, namely a local business Knowledge Panel that shows business information and, if applicable, links to a page or app where customers can place an order or make a reservation.

TheLocal Business Information page on Google Developers notes that the pilot is currently restricted to a set of initial data providers, but that they hope to soon open up the feature so any provider who implements spec-compliant markup is eligible to participate.

Information Courtesy of SEO Skeptic

If Google is running a pilot program you can bet that it wont be long before they are connecting the local business data submitted via schema.org with their Search Engine. Marketing your local business using schema.org is something you need to check into if you want to employ all available techniques to get your business more online exposure.

Learn more about SEO and how it affects your website on our SEO Best Practices page.