Google's Structured Data about businesses vs. “Google My Business”

Question

From my point of view there are two major possibilities on how to provide information about your business/organisation to Google:

1. Use structured data on your website like "Organization" and " Local Business"
2. Register your organization and its data in "Google My Business"

I see that there are strong overlaps of these data. So I guess that these are basically all data for the Google Knowledge Graph.

So what's the different for me as a site and business owner? Which method should be preferred? Or should I just do both with data as similar as possible? For the basic information this is fine but should I maintain details like business hours in both ways, structured data and in the Google My Business profile?

Answer 1

For the best SEO, the typical small business owner will likely want to use Google My Business and forget about the structured data. Google only really pays attention to business/organization structured data for larger brands for the most part, so the work done integrating structured data will not have a real tangible SEO benefit.

That said, there is no downside to implementing structured data, and if your company is or becomes large/reputable enough then Google will begin to pay attention to it for rich snippets and even knowledge graph features.

But as a rule of thumb for a local business (of low notability in a national/international sense), I would use Google My Business and just not worry about structured data.

Answer 2

It is best to use both if possible.

Google My Business will definitely be easier to maintain and setup for smaller teams. However, having additional data that is submitted to the Knowledge Graph through schema will send another signal of information about your business.

For all my SEO projects, I highly recommend using the organization schema and the "SameAs" property to link to your social profiles in order "own" a larger percentage the first page with to properties that you have control over.