Organization Schema: What It Is & How to Implement It

What Is Organization Schema?

Organization schema is a type of structured data. It gives search engines information about your organization or business.

Structured data is information in a standardized format that is easy for both humans and software to read.

Schema markup is a vocabulary for creating structured data. It defines certain values within the HTML code of your site to provide specific information to search engine crawlers.

In organization schema, these values relate to a business or organization. You might have heard it called company schema.

Pro tip: Check your schema implementation with the Site Audit Tool

Why Is Organization Schema Important for SEO?

Organization schema helps search engines understand your company. 

While structured data isn’t a ranking factor itself, using it can make it easier for search engines to show your webpage for relevant queries. 

Organization schema also helps improve your company credibility–both for search engines and searchers.

It can also help Google display your business information as a rich result or knowledge panel—with images, links, and additional information. Like this:

This makes your search appearance more attractive and informative for users. They can easily see what you do and engage with you.

It can also help your business take up more space in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This can give you an edge over your competitors. 

How to Implement Organization Schema

To implement organization schema, you need to write the organization schema markup and add it to your website.

There are various pieces of information you can add to the schema. As a minimum, you should add the following fields:

• Type of organization
• Organization name
• Official website
• Address
• Official logo
• Description
• Social accounts
• Unique identifying URL

There are a few ways you can do this:

JSON-LD

JSON-LD is a lightweight Linked Data format for writing structured data.

Google recommends that you use JSON-LD to add schema markup. So use this if you can.

You can either use a plugin to add the JSON-LD markup to your website or do it manually.

Plugins that let you add schema markup through JSON-LD include SchemaPro, Rank Math, and Yoast.

Or, to manually add JSON-LD markup to your website:

Copy the code below and paste into an HTML editor such as Notepad or Notepad++.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Organization",
"@id": "",
"name": "",
"url": "",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"addressLocality": "",
"addressCountry": "",
"postalCode": "",
"streetAddress": ""
}
 "logo": "",
 "description": "",
 "sameAs": [
 "",
 "",
 ""]
}
</script>

Then, add the details about your organization into each relevant field.

For “type,” you can add a specific type of organization. “Organization” is the broadest category. Here are some subcategories:

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

There are also further subcategories within some of these. View the full list at Schema.org.

Choose the type that suits you best and copy and paste the plain text (as is, without spaces) into the “@type” category.

“@sameAs” is where you add your social media links, Wikipedia page, company profiles on review sites, and professional association sites, etc.

Add as many as possible for maximum credibility and context.

Add each link in a separate set of quotation marks and on a separate line, as in the example.

In the “@id” category, you need to add a unique URL that will be used to identify your company.

You may be tempted to use your homepage as a unique identifier for your company. However, the homepage can also be the unique identifier for the “Website” schema.

Therefore, it’s clearer to use a unique anchor just for this purpose. It doesn’t have to be a real page. For example: https://www.example.com/#organization

Here’s an example of JSON-LD organization schema with the company details filled in:

You can also add any additional fields that are relevant for your organization. To see the different properties you can add, click through to the specific schema type from the list at Schema.org.

You can test your JSON-LD markup using the Schema.org schema markup validator. It will flag any errors for you to fix.

Once you’re happy with your JSON-LD markup, add the code snippet to your website.

We recommend you add your company schema to the homepage. You only need to add it to one page.

If you can, include it in the <head> tag. But if that’s not possible, you can add anywhere on the page—for example, in the body content or the footer.

Microdata

Another format for adding structured data is microdata. Microdata uses HTML markup to define structured data attributes. 

You can use microdata to add organization schema. However, implementation requires some knowledge of HTML markup.

To add organization schema to your site using microdata, you need to add markup to your existing content.

Here’s how:

1. Log in to your website backend where you can edit the code
2. Locate where key information about your company is listed. For example, your footer, homepage, or contact page
3. Directly before the key information, add the opening tag <div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Organization">
4. Then, you need to add the attributes for the different properties. For example, you need to mark up the company name using a tag that tells search engines it’s the company name. So you add the “name” attribute.
5. To add an attribute, you need to add a small snippet of code to the tag surrounding the piece of information. E.g., if the name of the business is in an H1 tag, like this: <h1>Company name</h1>, you need to add the code to the opening tag, directly after the H1.

6. Add your attributes by typing itemprop="" with the name of the property within the double quotation marks to the relevant opening tags. E.g. itemprop="name", itemprop="address". Like this:

<h2 itemprop="name">Company name</h1>
<p itemprop="description">Description of the company.</p>

7. When marking up the address, you’ll need to add an additional <div> tag, as the address is a schema category in its own right. Your address markup should look like this:

<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">800 Boylston Street</span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Boston</span>,
<span itemprop="addressRegion">Massachusetts</span>
<span itemprop="postalCode">02199</span>
<span itemprop="addressCountry">USA</span>
</div>

8. Once you’ve added all the attributes you want, add a closing </div> tag.
9. All put together, your organization schema with structured data should look something like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
<h1 itemprop="name">Semrush</h1>
<p itemprop="description">Semrush Holdings, Inc. is an American public company that offers a SaaS platform known as Semrush. The platform is often used for keyword research and online ranking data, including metrics such as search volume, Keyword research and cost per click</p>
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">800 Boylston Street</span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Boston</span>,
<span itemprop="addressRegion">Massachusetts</span>
<span itemprop="postalCode">02199</span>
<span itemprop="addressCountry">USA</span>
</div>
<span itemprop="telephone">+1 (800) 815 - 9959</span>
 <span itemprop="url">https://www.semrush.com/<span/>
 <span itemprop="sameAs">https://twitter.com/semrush</span>
 <span itemprop="sameAs">https://www.facebook.com/Semrush</span>
 <span itemprop="sameAs">https://www.linkedin.com/company/semrush</span>
 <span itemprop="sameAs">https://instagram.com/semrush/</span>
 <span itemprop="sameAs">https://www.youtube.com/user/SemrushHQ</span>
 <span itemprop="sameAs">https://www.pinterest.com/semrush/</span>
</div>

RDFa

The third and final way to add organization schema is through RDFa. It stands for Resource Description Framework in Attributes. And, like microdata, uses HTML to create structured data.

RDFa is an older type of markup and more complex than microdata. You may want to use it if you’re already using a platform that uses RDFa, such as Drupal.

To implement schema using RDFa:

1. Find where your company information is located on the backend of your website. It’s usually the homepage, the contact page, or the footer.
2. Right before this information, add the opening tag: <div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Organization">
3. Then, add the attributes for the different properties. Like with microdata, add these to the opening tag before each key piece of company information.
4. To add an attribute, add property="" with the name of the property within the double quotation marks. E.g. property="name", property="address". Add each property within the opening tag for each piece of information. Like this:

<span property="name">Company name</span>
 <span property="description">Description of the company.</span>

5. As with microdata, you’ll need to add an additional tag for the address. In RDFa, it’s like this: 

<div property="address" typeof="PostalAddress">
<span property="streetAddress"></span>
<span property="addressLocality"></span>,
<span property="addressRegion"></span>
<span property="postalCode"></span>
<span property="addressCountry"></span></div>

6. Put together, your organization schema in RDFa should look like this:

<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Organization">
<h1 property="name">Semrush</h1>
<p property="description">Semrush Holdings, Inc. is an American public company that offers a SaaS platform known as Semrush. The platform is often used for keyword research and online ranking data, including metrics such as search volume, Keyword research and cost per click</p>
<div property="address" typeof="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span property="streetAddress">800 Boylston Street</span>
<span property="addressLocality">Boston</span>,
<span property="addressRegion">Massachusetts</span>
<span property="postalCode">02199</span>
<span property="addressCountry">USA</span>
</div>
<span property="telephone">+1 (800) 815 - 9959</span>
 <span property="url">https://www.semrush.com/<span/>
 <span property="sameAs">https://twitter.com/semrush</span>
 <span property="sameAs">https://www.facebook.com/Semrush</span>
 <span property="sameAs">https://www.linkedin.com/company/semrush</span>
 <span property="sameAs">https://instagram.com/semrush/</span>
 <span property="sameAs">https://www.youtube.com/user/SemrushHQ</span>
 <span property="sameAs">https://www.pinterest.com/semrush/</span>
</div>

How to Test Your Organization Schema

You can run tests to see what schema is already on your site.

You can also test organization schema that you have implemented.

Here’s how:

Site Audit

You can check your structured data using the Semrush Site Audit tool.

Follow these steps:

Open Site Audit.

If you have an existing project for the website you want to test, click on that. Alternatively, create a new project with the relevant domain.

This will automatically run a site audit. Check out our technical audit guide for how to set up a Site Audit on a new project. 

Clicking on to the existing site audit project will take you to the “Overview” pane.

Find the “Markup” section and click “View details”.

On the next screen, you can see:

• How many of your checked pages contain schema markup
• The type of schema markup found on each page
• Any schema markup that’s invalid

Scroll down and you’ll find a table entitled “Structured Data Items.”

If any of the items are invalid, click “View all invalid items” at the bottom.

 Click on any entry in the “Affected Fields” column to see specific errors per identified issue.

Now you can see what the errors are and fix them. If you’re not sure about how to fix an error, click on “Why and how to fix it” for more information.

Once you’ve fixed the errors, rerun the audit to check they’ve been rectified.

Schema.org

The other primary way of testing your organization schema is using the Schema.org validator.

To test a webpage you’ve already added organization schema to, enter the URL in the field under “FETCH URL” and click “RUN TEST.”

Alternatively, to test a code snippet you’ve written but not yet implemented, go to https://validator.schema.org/ and click on the “Code snippet” tab.

Paste your code into the box and click “RUN TEST.”

Any errors or warnings will be highlighted so you can easily identify and fix them.

Organization Schema Example

Below you can see a filled-out version of an organization schema from the Semrush website.

We use the “Corporation” subtype.

Best Practices for Using Organization Schema

• Use JSON-LD format where possible

• Only include accurate and up-to-**** information. It should match the other details about your company across the web. This includes your Google Business Profile and info on your website and socials.

• Add as much relevant information as possible. For example, the “LocalBusiness” subcategory lets you add opening hours, prices, geo-coordinates, and more.

• Add as many “@sameAs” links as possible. This will improve your credibility and add context.

• Follow Google’s spam guidelines. Don’t use structured data to mislead users. Make sure the information you provide is truthful and accurate.

Leverage Schema to Maximize Your Search Presence

Organization schema is a great way to improve your company’s overall SERP visibility.

Ultimately, that can improve the amount of traffic you get to your website. And, potentially, your number of customers.

Semrush’s Site Audit tool makes it easy to view and test your structured data. Along with a wealth of other technical data about your website’s SEO performance.

Sign up for free and start improving your website’s SEO performance today.