Every business we audit in Greater Vancouver has the same story on reviews: years of excellent service, dozens or hundreds of five-star ratings on Google, and a review score that is completely invisible in search results.
Not because the reviews aren’t there. Because the code that tells Google to display them isn’t.
That code is called review schema. And in over 50 audits of local service businesses — HVAC companies, auto repair shops, moving companies, career colleges — we have not found a single one that had it correctly in place.
What review schema actually does
When someone searches “HVAC company Vancouver,” they see a list of results. Some of those results have star ratings displayed directly in the listing — yellow stars, a score, a review count. Others don’t.
The businesses with stars in their listings get significantly more clicks. Users interpret the stars as a trust signal before they’ve even visited the site. Google’s own data shows that rich results (the technical term for enhanced search listings) consistently outperform standard results on click-through rate.
Review schema is the structured data markup — a block of code added to your website — that tells Google: this business has reviews, here is the rating, here is the count. Without it, Google has no reliable way to surface your reviews in search results, even if you have 400 five-star ratings on your Google Business Profile.
Why almost no local service businesses have it
Schema markup is invisible to the eye. It doesn’t change how your website looks. It sits in the code, readable by Google but not by visitors. Because it has no visible impact on the page, it’s easy to skip — and most web designers who build sites for service businesses don’t add it.
It’s also technically specific enough that adding it incorrectly — wrong property names, wrong format, wrong context — means Google ignores it entirely. We see this on sites that think they have schema in place. A quick check with Google’s Rich Results Test shows errors that invalidate the whole block.
The result: businesses with 4.7-star averages built over a decade of good work are invisible in the one place that matters — the search results page where their next customer is deciding who to call.
What this looks like in practice
In a recent audit of a Vancouver HVAC company with 14 years in business and 50 Google reviews, we found:
- No LocalBusiness schema on any page
- No Review schema — the 50 reviews were not referenced anywhere in the site’s structured data
- No AggregateRating — so even if they’d had basic schema, there was no summary rating signal for Google to use
Their competitor, a newer company with fewer reviews and a lower rating, had all three in place. The competitor showed stars in search. Our client didn’t. The competitor was receiving more clicks despite having the weaker reputation.
This is not a rare situation. It is the norm.
The three schema types that matter for local service businesses
LocalBusiness schema is the foundation. It tells Google who you are — your name, address, phone number, category, hours of operation, and service area. It establishes your business as a real, structured entity in Google’s knowledge graph rather than just a collection of text on a page.
Review schema references individual reviews published on your site. It includes the review body, the reviewer, the date, and the rating. When Google processes this, it can associate those specific reviews with your business entity.
AggregateRating schema is what actually produces the stars you see in search results. It gives Google a summary: overall rating value, number of reviews. This is the signal that triggers the rich result display — the stars next to your listing.
All three work together. AggregateRating without LocalBusiness gives Google a rating for a business it can’t confidently identify. LocalBusiness without AggregateRating gives Google a business profile with no rating to display. You need the complete structure.
How to check if your site has it
Google provides two free tools for this:
Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results) — paste your homepage URL and Google will tell you whether your structured data qualifies for rich results and flag any errors.
Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org) — a more granular view of all structured data on a page, including warnings for missing recommended properties.
If you run your site through either tool and see no results for LocalBusiness, Review, or AggregateRating, you don’t have it in place.
The compounding effect
Review schema is one piece of the local SEO picture, but it has an outsized return for the effort it requires. Once it’s correctly implemented, it works passively — every new review you earn on Google becomes fuel for the schema signal.
For a business with 50 reviews and a 4.8-star average, correct schema implementation can produce a visible star rating in search results in days. That star rating then increases your click-through rate, which tells Google your result is more relevant, which supports stronger ranking over time.
It is foundational work. It is also, consistently, the most overlooked fix we find in audits.
This finding comes from Arara SEO’s audit database of Greater Vancouver service businesses. If you’d like to know whether your site has review schema in place — and what it would take to implement it correctly — the audit is free.