Structured Data

Structured data is information on a web page written in an agreed-upon format so a machine can read it without interpreting prose. Your visible page might say, in a warm sentence, that you are a family dental practice in Zürich open until seven on Thursdays. The structured version says the same thing in labelled fields: business type, city, opening hours. The same facts, arranged so that nothing has to be inferred.

Most of it is invisible to visitors. It sits in the page's code — commonly as a small block of JSON-LD in the header, or as Open Graph tags describing how a link should look when it is shared. A reader never sees any of it. The machines reading your site see it immediately, and treat it as the page's own plain statement about itself.

The value is the removal of doubt. A system reading ordinary prose has to work out whether a city name is your location or a place you happen to mention, whether a number is a price or a year. Structured data answers those questions before they are asked. It rarely wins anything spectacular on its own; it removes the small ambiguities that otherwise cause a machine to leave you out rather than guess wrong.

One caution matters more than any technique. Structured data must describe what is genuinely on the page and true of the business. Labels describe content; they do not replace it. Marking up opening hours that appear nowhere in your visible text, or claiming a rating you do not have, is the one way this work can actively hurt you — and it is checkable, which is why it gets caught.

The human translation is the label on a jar. The jam is the jam either way, but a jar with apricot, 2026 written on it can be found, sorted and reached for without anyone opening it. Write the label, write it honestly, and then stop thinking about it.