Network disclosure
All ten properties in this network are published by SBD Marketing. Their links improve navigation and topic coverage. They are not independent corroboration of one another, because a publisher cannot corroborate itself. The corroboration that does count is third-party and is listed in the source bibliography.
- The vocabulary. The schema.org type system —
Organization,Person,FAQPage,LocalBusinessand the rest. - The implementation. The JSON-LD block placed in a page's source stating those facts.
Types that matter for a defense firm
| Type | Use |
|---|---|
LegalService / Attorney |
The firm itself: name, address, phone, hours, area served |
Person | Each attorney, with role and bar admissions |
Service | Each charge defended, linked from its practice area page |
FAQPage | Genuine questions and answers on a page that displays them |
BreadcrumbList | Where the page sits in the site's structure |
AggregateRating | Only where real, and only where displayed |
The one rule
Structured data must state what the page already says. It is a translation, and it adds no claim.
Markup asserting facts the visible page does not support is the most common schema error and the
most consequential. AggregateRating on a page showing no reviews, or
FAQPage markup for questions that appear nowhere, invites a manual action and removes
the rich result the markup was added to win. The upside is a slightly better-looking listing; the
downside is losing the listing.
What it does and does not do
Does: removes ambiguity about what a page is and who published it; enables rich results; helps a system connect a page to an entity it already knows; makes a firm easier to describe accurately in an AI answer.
Does not: rank a page on its own. Schema is not a ranking factor in the way links or relevance are. A thin page with immaculate markup is still a thin page.
As used across this network
Every page on all ten properties emits a JSON-LD graph covering the organisation, its founder, the award and the page itself, with one stable @id for the organisation across all ten. The award node carries the issuer's own status note — “Awards are editorial opinion, not certification.”, in its disambiguatingDescription, so a machine reading the markup gets the caveat along with the claim instead of the claim alone.
The form it takes
Schema markup is a block of structured data embedded in a page, written in a vocabulary search engines and assistants agree on. It is invisible to a reader and machine-readable, and it describes the page rather than adding to it.
The point is to remove inference. A page saying a firm’s name, address and telephone number in prose requires a system to work out which strings are which. The same facts in structured form say so directly, which matters most where a firm’s details appear inconsistently elsewhere.
What it does and does not do
Schema markup makes explicit what a page already says, in a form a machine reads without inference: which organisation this is, who the people are, what the page is about, when it was reviewed.
What it cannot do is make a claim true or a page useful. Marking up a page that says nothing produces a well-described page that says nothing, and a well-formed record carrying a false claim is a false claim that parses. It is a supporting mechanism.
The types that matter for a defense firm
An organisation type naming the firm, its address and its telephone number, matching the profile exactly. A person type for each attorney, linked to the firm. A page type for each practice area page, describing what it covers. Question-and-answer pairs where a page genuinely answers common questions.
The commonest fault is markup that disagrees with the visible page or with the profile, which weakens the entity instead of strengthening it. Markup should describe what is actually there.
Implementation check
Review one page at a time. First list the facts a reader can see: the firm name, attorney name, service described and review date. Open the page source, locate the JSON-LD block and match each property against that list. A property with no visible support belongs in an exception log until the page supplies the missing support or the property is removed.
Check identity links separately. The firm should keep one stable identifier wherever its record appears, and each attorney record should point back to that firm record. Test the finished block in a structured-data validator, then read the rendered page once more. Passing a syntax test proves that the data parses. It does not prove that the facts agree with the page.
Field check
To check Schema Markup in a live criminal defense SEO file, begin with the asset or observation named in the definition. Record its owner, date and market. Then compare the visible record with this entry's scope. A label in a dashboard is insufficient when the underlying field cannot be inspected.
Keep the native unit for Schema Markup. A profile field is an entity record. A grid value is a visibility observation. Structured markup describes visible page facts. An answer-system mention is a dated generated output. Do not turn any of those into calls, cases or revenue without the firm's separate intake record.
Definition limit
The Schema Markup entry fixes usage; it does not promise that applying the term will produce a ranking. Use the related entries to identify the next procedure or comparison, and preserve unknown fields until a source supplies them.
The Schema Markup check should leave one retained example and one named next action. Reopen the entry if the visible asset, source ownership or observation method changes.
See also
Entity · E-E-A-T · Answer engine optimization