EP Local Business

EP Local Business adds full Schema.org LocalBusiness emission to any PageMotor site. Address, opening hours (with overnight splitting), geo coordinates, service area, payment methods, currencies, tax identifiers, and 30 curated business subtypes from Restaurant to Veterinary. Settings-driven, sitewide, and built to coexist cleanly with EP SEO.

For multi-location operators, install EP Locations instead. EP Local Business defers to it automatically.

This page documents EP Local Business 1.1.15.

Published by ElmsPark Studio.

What EP Local Business does

30 curated LocalBusiness subtypes plus an “Other / Custom…” override for any Schema.org LocalBusiness child type.
Full address with ISO 3166-1 country code, and optional one-click geocoding via OpenStreetMap Nominatim.
Weekly opening hours grid with multi-interval days (lunch closures, split shifts), copy-to-all helpers, and automatic splitting of overnight intervals on emission (22:00 to 02:00 emits as Mon 22:00-23:59 plus Tue 00:00-02:00).
Service area: at-address only, a radius around your address (emitted as GeoCircle), or a list of named areas (AdministrativeArea).
Price range, payment methods, accepted currencies (ISO 4217).
Profile URLs (sameAs) for social, augmenting any Organisation-level sameAs.
VAT, tax, and ISIC v4 identifiers, with advisory UK VAT format validation.
Open Graph business contact-data tags emitted automatically when the address is sufficiently complete.
JSON-LD preview tool that renders the live schema against the current form state, before you save.
Schema.org validator deep-link for instant external validation.
Coexistence with EP SEO in two modes, merged or additive.
Six EU language translations of the entire admin UI.

What EP Local Business doesn’t do

Multiple locations. That is EP Locations, which is what you want for chains, franchises, or any business with more than one branch.
Holiday or special hours overrides. Planned for a future release.
hasOfferCatalog (structured services with prices). Planned.
aggregateRating or review CRUD. Use EP Reviews when it ships.
Per-page LocalBusiness overrides. Settings-driven sitewide only.

Requirements

PageMotor 0.8.3 or later. Required because EP Local Business uses PageMotor’s framework-level CSRF (an auto-injected X-CSRF-Token header on authenticated AJAX). Earlier versions reject the preview, geocode and hours-validation requests.
EP Suite base class (auto-loaded with any EP plugin).
EP SEO, optional. Needed only for the merged-mode handshake that produces a single combined Organization plus LocalBusiness node. Additive mode and standalone operation work fine without it.

Installation

Download the latest ep-local-business.zip from the EP Suite downloads page.
In PageMotor admin go to Plugins → Manage Plugins → Upload, select the zip, and activate.
Open the plugin’s settings page and tick Enable LocalBusiness schema in the Business section. Without this gate, no LocalBusiness JSON-LD is emitted.
Fill in at least the business name, address and country code. Add hours and geo coordinates for a richer schema.

Settings

The settings page has nine sections, each rendered as a collapsible card.

Business

Identity, type, and description.

Enable LocalBusiness schema. Master gate. Required for any emission.
Business Type. Pick the most specific match from the curated list (AutoRepair, Bakery, Restaurant, Dentist, and so on) or choose Other / Custom… to enter any Schema.org LocalBusiness subtype by hand. Custom values outside the recognised allowlist still emit; you just see an advisory warning.
Business Name. The trading name. Required. The schema does not emit without it, even when the master gate is on.
Legal Name. Registered legal entity, if different from the trading name.
Description. One or two sentences. Keep it under 200 characters.
Founding Date. ISO 8601 date (YYYY-MM-DD).
Slogan. Tagline or catchphrase, if you use one.

Contact

Phone, email, logo, and photos.

Telephone. Use E.164 format where possible (+44 1234 567890). Stored and emitted as entered.
Email. Public-facing business email. Optional.
Logo URL. Full URL to the business logo. Recommended: 600x600 PNG with a transparent background.
Photo URLs. One image URL per line. These become the LocalBusiness image property. Storefront and interior shots work well.

Location

Address and coordinates.

Street Address, Town/City, County/Region, Postcode. Standard postal address fields.
Country (ISO 3166-1). Two-letter alpha-2 code (GB, IE, US, DE).
Latitude / Longitude. Decimal degrees, range -90 to 90 and -180 to 180. Out-of-range values are silently dropped from the emitted schema.
Look up coordinates from address. One-click geocoding via OpenStreetMap Nominatim. The button sends the assembled address fields to nominatim.openstreetmap.org on click and fills in latitude and longitude from the first match. Throttled client-side to one request every 1.5 seconds, in line with Nominatim’s terms of use. Pasting coordinates from Google Maps or Apple Maps works just as well; geocoding is opt-in only.
Map URL. Optional Google Maps, OpenStreetMap or Apple Maps URL pointing to the location. Emitted as hasMap.

Opening Hours

The trickiest UI in the plugin, and the one most worth exploring.

Each day (Mon to Sun) has an Open / Closed toggle.
Open days take one or more time intervals, useful for businesses that close for lunch (08:00-12:00 plus 13:00-17:30) or run split shifts.
The + Add interval button on each day stacks multiple opens and closes per day.
The Copy to all button on each row copies that day’s status and intervals to every other day. Set Monday once, click Copy to all, then tweak the weekend.
24 hours a day is representable as a single 00:00 to 23:59 interval.
Overnight intervals are handled automatically. Enter 22:00 to 02:00 on Monday, the typical late-bar pattern, and the schema emits two OpeningHoursSpecification entries: Monday 22:00-23:59 and Tuesday 00:00-02:00. Enter the natural interval on the day it starts and let the plugin do the split.
Stored as JSON in a single hidden field, emitted as a Schema.org openingHoursSpecification array.

Service

Area, pricing, payment.

Service Area. Three modes:
- At our address only. Suits walk-in businesses.
- Radius around our address. Combines with latitude and longitude to emit a GeoCircle with geoMidpoint and geoRadius in metres.
- List of named areas. One area per line (“County Wexford”, “Greater London”). Each line emits as an AdministrativeArea entry.
Service Radius (km). Used by radius mode. Converted to metres for Schema.org.
Areas Served. Used by list mode. One area per line.
Price Range. From £ inexpensive through ££££ premium.
Payment Methods Accepted. Tick boxes for Cash, Credit Card, Debit Card, Cheque, Bank Transfer, Invoice, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Cryptocurrency. Joined into a comma-separated paymentAccepted string.
Currencies Accepted. Comma-separated ISO 4217 codes (GBP, EUR). Whitespace is stripped and codes are uppercased.

Profile URLs. One URL per line. Facebook page, LinkedIn company page, X/Twitter profile, Instagram, and so on. Emitted as the sameAs array on the LocalBusiness node.

Tax & Identifiers

VAT ID. When the country code is GB, the value is format-checked against UK VAT patterns (9-digit, 12-digit, government-department GD###, health-authority HA###). Advisory only; the schema emits regardless.
Tax ID. Other tax registration number (CRO, EIN, and similar).
ISIC v4 Code. International Standard Industrial Classification. Optional.

Integration

Coexistence with EP SEO.

Coexistence Mode. See the next section.
Schema ID Anchor. The fragment used in @id for additive mode, so localbusiness yields https://example.com/#localbusiness. Letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores only. Default localbusiness. Ignored in merged mode, which always uses #organization.

Tools

Preview JSON-LD. Sends the current form state to the plugin and renders the resulting @graph in a modal, with no need to save first. Shows the current coexistence mode, whether emission is active, whether EP SEO is present, and whether EP Locations has taken over.
Open in Schema.org validator. Deep-links to validator.schema.org with your site’s origin pre-filled. Use it after deploying changes.

Coexistence with EP SEO

If you are a sole trader or single-business owner, meaning the business is the organisation behind the website, leave coexistence mode at the default of Merged. EP SEO yields its Organization branch and EP Local Business emits one combined node typed ["Organization", "LocalBusiness"] at #organization. The combined node folds in EP SEO’s name, URL, description and any other Organisation properties on top of the LocalBusiness body. This is the cleanest representation for the typical case.

If your business has a separate parent organisation distinct from this location, a franchise, a group operator or a holding company, choose Additive. EP SEO emits its Organization node at #organization as normal and EP Local Business adds a separate LocalBusiness node at #<id_anchor> with a parentOrganization reference back to #organization. Schema validators understand both nodes as related but distinct.

If EP SEO is not installed at all, EP Local Business emits its own LocalBusiness node either way; the coexistence setting then only affects the @id anchor.

The handshake itself is automatic and needs no configuration in EP SEO. EP SEO calls a static EP_Local_Business::owns_organization_node() check from its own structured-data emission; in merged mode that returns true and EP SEO yields its Organization branch entirely.

EP Locations defer

When EP Locations is installed and active alongside EP Local Business, EP Local Business yields LocalBusiness emission entirely and EP Locations owns it. The handshake is a static class check inside EP Local Business, and needs no configuration. This is intentional: multi-location is a content-driven problem, where each branch needs its own URL, hours and address, and that is what EP Locations is built for.

Your settings page still lets you edit the data while deferred, so nothing is lost if you later deactivate EP Locations.

Open Graph business contact data

When LocalBusiness emission is active and the address is sufficiently complete (street, locality and country all populated), EP Local Business automatically emits Facebook’s Open Graph business contact-data tags:

og:type set to business.business, overriding PageMotor’s default article or website
og:business:contact_data:street_address
og:business:contact_data:locality
og:business:contact_data:region
og:business:contact_data:postal_code
og:business:contact_data:country_name
og:business:contact_data:phone_number, if telephone is set
og:business:contact_data:email, if email is set

Useful for Facebook business page link previews, and a small but non-zero ranking signal.

Languages

The admin UI is fully translated into German (de), Spanish (es), French (fr), Italian (it), Dutch (nl) and Portuguese (pt). Schema.org code identifiers, the literal LocalBusiness, Organization and parentOrganization values in the emitted JSON-LD, stay English in every language because they are code, not prose.

Switch UI language from the EP Suite language dropdown in the admin nav.

EP Local Business is settings-driven and exposes no third-party services to public visitors. The OpenStreetMap Nominatim geocode helper is admin-only: it lives on the plugin’s settings page, fires only on an explicit click, and is never reached by a site visitor. No consent gating is required.

The schema and Open Graph tags the plugin emits contain only data the site admin chose to publish (business name, address, telephone, opening hours), which is public information about the business rather than visitor data. It does become part of every public page, so do not put internal-only data into these fields.

If you also install EP Locations for the multi-location store finder, that plugin handles its own GDPR integration for the public-facing map and search.

Action / boundary methods (for AI agents and CLI scripts)

EP Local Business follows the PageMotor action / operation pattern. Three actions are exposed as public methods that can be called directly, without simulating a POST:

Action	Returns
`preview($settings)`	`['success' => true, 'json_ld' => …, 'mode' => …, 'active' => bool, …]`
`geocode($address)`	`['success' => bool, 'latitude' => …, 'longitude' => …, 'display_name' => …]`, or failure with `reason`
`validate_hours($hours)`	`['success' => bool, 'errors' => […], 'schema' => […]]`

Each has a paired <name>_post() boundary method that reads $_POST, performs the admin-access check, and echoes JSON. Useful if you are building tooling around the plugin from outside its admin UI.

Troubleshooting

“I enabled the plugin but no schema appears in the page source”

Three things to check:

The Enable LocalBusiness schema box is ticked.
Business Name is filled in. Without it the schema is suppressed even when enabled.
EP Locations is not active. If it is, EP Local Business yields to it. The Preview tool tells you, via ep_locations_present: yes.

View page source and search for application/ld+json to confirm the node is rendering.

“Hours grid says Open but no times show”

Add at least one interval with the + Add interval button. An open day with no intervals emits as closed.

“The geocode button doesn’t find my address”

Nominatim’s coverage is excellent for high-density urban addresses but can be patchy for rural or recently built ones. Try entering just street, town and country, dropping the postcode and region, then click again. If it still fails, open https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=<your+address> in a browser: if OSM cannot find it there, EP Local Business cannot either. Paste latitude and longitude from Google Maps as a fallback.

“The geocode button does nothing at all”

Different symptom, different cause. Either your server cannot reach nominatim.openstreetmap.org (check egress rules), or the click is being throttled. See the next entry.

“Geocode says ‘Please wait a moment before trying again’”

Nominatim’s terms of use cap requests at one per second. EP Local Business throttles client-side to one every 1.5 seconds for safety. Wait two seconds and click again.

“Rich Results Test flags an unrecognised business type”

You used the Other / Custom… option with a value that is not a recognised Schema.org LocalBusiness subtype. Either pick from the curated list, or check the spelling against the LocalBusiness type list on schema.org and re-enter it exactly.

“My hours grid won’t accept overnight times”

It should. Entering open 22:00 and close 02:00 is valid, and the emission code splits it automatically as described above. If you are seeing a validation error instead, that is a bug: open a ticket with the exact times and the day you entered.

“Overnight hours look wrong in the schema preview”

That is by design. An interval like 22:00 to 02:00 splits into two OpeningHoursSpecification entries, today 22:00-23:59 and tomorrow 00:00-02:00, because Schema.org does not model intervals crossing midnight as a single entry. Validators accept the split form.

“I’m seeing two Organization nodes on the page”

EP SEO and EP Local Business are both emitting an Organization. Set Coexistence Mode to Merged, save, and reload. EP SEO will yield its Organization branch.

“I want EP SEO to keep emitting Organisation separately”

Set Coexistence Mode to Additive. EP SEO emits Organization at #organization and EP Local Business emits its LocalBusiness at the configured #<id_anchor>, with a parentOrganization reference back.

“I switched on EP Local Business and lost my Person schema”

You probably had EP SEO’s Schema Type set to Person and switched coexistence mode to Merged, which assumes Organisation-shaped semantics. Either switch coexistence mode to Additive, so EP SEO keeps emitting your Person schema separately, or change EP SEO’s Schema Type to Organization if Person was a leftover from before the business existed.

“EP Local Business says it’s deferred to EP Locations”

EP Locations is active and has at least one live Location entry. They are mutually exclusive at runtime. If you want EP Local Business to handle schema instead, deactivate EP Locations or delete its live locations.

“VAT ID validation flagged my number but it’s correct”

The UK VAT validator checks format only, not validity, and applies only when the country is GB. The schema emits the value regardless of the warning. If your number is genuinely valid, check it matches one of the patterns: 9 digits, 12 digits, GD### for a government department, or HA### for a health authority. Numbers from other countries do not trigger validation.

Feedback and corrections

For a quick question about this plugin, EP Support inside your admin is the fastest option. The chat widget sits on every EP plugin settings page and knows which one you’re on, with starter questions and links preloaded for that exact screen.

For anything bigger, a bug report, a feature request, or a “how do I…” that needs a real reply, open a ticket at help.elmspark.com. A real person, helped by AI, writes the reply. Usually within a few hours. Tickets don’t disappear into the void.

Changelog

1.1.16

Settings language menu. The language menu in this plugin’s settings now lists only the languages it is actually translated into, plus English, so you can no longer pick a language that changes nothing.
Danish. Adds a Danish translation.
Section status. Each settings section shows whether that feature is switched on. On a site that also runs an older EP plugin, the section shows its plain title instead.
The Docs link on the Plugins screen now opens this plugin’s page on documentation.elmspark.com.

1.1.15

Fixes “Your session has expired. Please reload to ensure your security.” on PageMotor 0.11. The message appeared on this plugin’s admin screens even though you were signed in perfectly normally, and whatever you were doing failed to save.
Nothing was wrong with your session. PageMotor 0.11 started handling part of the security check that this plugin was already handling itself, and the two together made every save look invalid. The plugin now checks whether PageMotor has already done it.
Visitors who were not signed in were never affected, on any version.
There is nothing to reconfigure, and nothing else changed.