Why Are My Structured Data Entities Merging?

Today I found an issue on my website that may have been holding me back in local search! (Disclaimer: technical SEO nerd content ahead)

My website and brand are still new - much newer than those of most of my clients, who often had existing SEO and brand equity for their domain even if their website needed an update. I’m still trying to find my footing in local search for my services.

A recent experiment I conducted with my website affected my structured data. Instead of being clearly described as a Northwest Arkansas based business, I was just seeing the WebSite schema in the schema.org validator results.

The Cause

I overlooked that I was using the same @id for the WebSite schema and LocalBusiness schema, and Google was merging the LocalBusiness data into the WebSite block.

The Result

No LocalBusiness schema, and ranking in Dover, UK and Dover, Deleware instead of Northwest Arkansas! I can understand why, given that my business name features “Dover” prominently and it appears everywhere on the site.

The fix was easy (adding a #LocalBusiness fragment to the ID for the appropriate schema block). Hopefully I see a bump in local SEO in the coming months since Google now knows for sure I’m based here.

This is the kind of thing I look for when maintaining a site, not to mention cleaning up referral spam in analytics, and keeping an eye on performance. More on the referral spam coming soon!

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If this is an issue you’re seeing on your site (or a client’s), here’s how to fix it:

How To Fix WebSite and LocalBusiness Structured Data Merging

Make sure you check each block using the schema.org validator, first of all. Invalid formatting won’t help you.

Next, make sure you give each block a unique @id. It’s common practice to use a fragment like #LocalBusiness (eg https://dover.digital#LocalBusiness) to let search engines know it’s a unique piece of content, but overall anything is fine as long as it’s valid according to the spec and unique (ie not reused by other structured data blocks on the same site).

And that seems like it’s pretty much it! An easy thing to overlook, but also easy to catch using the validation tool.