Case study

Case Study: From Zero Schema to 94/100 in Five Days

Roofing contractor. North Idaho. 100+ page WordPress site. Started with zero structured data and six critical gaps.

The situation when we started

This roofing company had been in business for years. Strong local reputation, decent Google reviews, a real website with real content. On paper, they looked like a well-established local business.

When we ran the AI Visibility Audit, the schema readiness score came back at zero. Not low — zero. Not a single JSON-LD block anywhere on the site. No LocalBusiness schema telling AI platforms what the business does or where it operates. No Service schema for any of the services they offer. No FAQPage schema despite having FAQ sections on multiple pages. Nothing.

The overall score was 57 out of 100. Six critical gaps. The site ranked reasonably well in traditional search but was structurally invisible to AI platforms — and to the structured data signals Google itself increasingly uses for local pack rankings.

What the audit found

No LocalBusiness schema on any page — AI platforms couldn’t identify the business type, service area, or entity
No Service schema — search engines and AI were guessing what services were offered
No FAQPage schema — FAQ content existed but wasn’t machine-readable
No Person schema — no named author or owner connected to the content
Technical health at 72/100 — crawlability issues on several key service pages
Meta quality inconsistencies across the site’s 100+ pages

Six critical gaps. The audit ranked them by impact. The plan was to close them in priority order.

What we did

Day one: deployed LocalBusiness and Organization schema to the homepage and core pages. Named the business, defined the service area, anchored the entity. This is the foundation — without it, nothing else stacks properly.

Day two: Service schema across all primary service pages. Each service named, described, and linked back to the LocalBusiness entity. AI platforms can now parse every offering the business provides.

Day three: FAQPage schema on every page with FAQ accordion content. This doesn’t just add a schema type — it converts existing question-and-answer content into a format that AI platforms can extract and cite directly.

Day four: technical crawlability fixes. Cleaned up redirect chains, fixed broken internal links, improved meta consistency across pages.

Day five: Person schema added to the About page and key service pages, connecting the owner to the content as a credentialed human source.

The score progression

This is what the audit scores looked like across the five days:

Day 1 baseline: 57/100 — schema 0, 6 critical gaps
After LocalBusiness deployment: 64/100 — schema 0→40 in progress
After Service schema: 70/100 — schema 40, 3 critical gaps
After FAQPage + technical: 85/100 — schema 100, 0 critical gaps
Final: 88/100 — all six critical gaps closed
Current (with continued optimization): 94/100

Schema went from 0 to 100. Six critical gaps became zero. The overall score went from a D to an A in the span of a standard work week.

Why this matters beyond the score

The score is a proxy for something more important: whether AI platforms can understand and trust this business as a source. Before the sprint, the site was structurally invisible — not because the content was bad, but because there was no structured layer telling machines what to make of it.

After the sprint, every major AI platform can parse the entity. The business is now a named, credentialed local source with defined services, a defined service area, and human authorship attached to its content. That is what determines whether you show up when someone asks ChatGPT who to call.

The takeaway

Schema is not an optional add-on. It is the foundation layer that everything else sits on. A site with strong content but zero schema is like a business with a great reputation and no sign on the door. The AI platforms cannot find you, cannot read you, and cannot cite you.

The fixes are mechanical. They do not require new content, a new site, or a significant budget. They require knowing what is missing, deploying it in the right order, and verifying it correctly. That is the work.

Run your free AI Visibility Audit

For a 100-page site starting from zero, a full schema sprint takes 3–5 business days. This includes LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, and Person schema across all relevant pages, plus verification through Google’s Rich Results Test.

Schema changes are typically indexed within 1–3 weeks. Google’s structured data signals can influence local pack rankings, and AI citation rates often improve within 30–60 days of deployment. The improvements compound over time as AI platforms re-crawl and update their knowledge.

LocalBusiness schema is foundational — it tells search engines and AI platforms what your business is, where it operates, and what it does. Without it, everything else is less effective. Service schema and FAQPage schema are the next highest-priority additions.

More client results

Not sure where your business stands? Run the free 30-second check and see who gets the call instead of you on Google and the map.