An SEO professional asked John Mueller during his submitted Question and Answer segment about local pages with Schema markup.
They are setting up a central U.S. English-based page for the About Us section, with information for various office locations and contact points.
There are also localized versions of the pages in the different country versions, which often have fewer offices and phone numbers.
Their main question is: how important is it for localized pages to get their own Schema, or can Google pull enough information from the primary English version of the page that lists all worldwide offices and phone numbers?
John answered that there are two aspects there. On one hand, if you have different local versions of a page, Google will not pull the structured data from a different page to try to apply to that local version of the page.
So it’s not that there’s any kind of magical passing of structured data that’s happening behind the scenes to individual parts of a website.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that structured data is something that you would use primarily because it has a visible effect in the search results. And it’s not really something that would change the ranking of a page.
So if you’re using this structured data to get some specific feature in the search results, then John recommends putting that on those individual pages where you want the feature to be used.
If you’re just using the structured data as a way of giving Google a bit more information, because perhaps Google will find this information useful, John states that it’s a very very small thing when it comes to ranking factors.
This happens at approximately the 40:13 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 40:13
Let’s see, I’m setting up a central US English-based page for the About contact with schema information for various office locations and contact points.
But there are also localized versions of the pages in the different country versions, often with fewer offices and phone numbers.
How important is it for these localized pages to get their own schema, or can Google pull enough information from the primary English version of the page that lists all worldwide offices and phone numbers?
John (Answer) 40:47
So I think there are two aspects here. On the one hand, if you have different local versions of a page, we would not pull the structured data from a different page to try to apply to that local version of the page.
So it’s not that there’s any kind of magical kind of passing of structured data that’s happening behind the scenes to individual parts of a website. The other thing to keep in mind here is that structured data is something that primarily you would use because it has a visible effect in the search results. It’s not really something that would change the ranking of a page.
So if you’re using this structured data to get some specific feature in the search results, then I would put that on those individual pages where you want that feature to be used. If you’re just using the structured data as a way of giving Google a little bit more information, because maybe Google will find this information useful, then that’s something where I’d say like, it’s a very, very small thing. And whether or not you do it or don’t do it, is probably not going to change the overall perception of a website.
So, especially with regard to individual locations, my understanding is we don’t show this in the search results anyway. At most, it might be shown in like a knowledge panel on the side, which would probably also be pulled from your Google business profile listings. So probably this particular type of structured data is not critical for your website anyway.
So from that point of view, like if you want to put it on these pages, go for it. If you can’t put it on all of these pages, and it’s like, probably not critical, because we don’t show it anyway. If it were something that you wanted to have shown in the search results, then I would make sure that you put it on all of the pages. There’s no magical kind of like taking it from one version of the site and applying it to another version.
