Phone number SEO

Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
User avatar
kevsboredagain
Posts: 3207
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 9:32 am
Location: France
Contact:

Phone number SEO

Post by kevsboredagain »

I discovered something interesting recently. A collegue at work tried to find me online by searching for my phone number. They did of course find me but only on a few limited places. Why so limited when I'm in several places online? Well because they searched for the number without spaces. Eg +417xxxxxxxx

Now I would have expected Google to know this was a phone number and return results even if the pages used the form +41 7xx xxx xxx, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t find any pages where the phone number has spaces.

What does this mean? If you want guests to be able to find and verify your existence, something which is becoming more and more important, you may need to have your phone number in different formats.

In my case, I have websites with a number displayed in both the header and footer. Both use a non standard number layout simply because I find it easier to remember. I never considered SEO at all. Seeing now how Google works, I will now change to make one a standard layout and the other with no spaces, to facilitate searches.

It worth searching for yourself using only a phone number.
Joanna
Posts: 1091
Joined: Thu Aug 23, 2007 3:12 pm
Location: Chester, North West England & Sidmouth, East Devon
Contact:

Post by Joanna »

I show my number as +44 (0)7966 ****** so I should probably have a version as 07966 because most of our guests are from the UK and would search without the +44...
Jo

Joint owner of Baker's Cottage in Chester & Chandler's Cottage in Sidmouth
tavi
Posts: 2578
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2011 9:07 pm
Location: Algarve

Post by tavi »

thanks Kev - worth knowing. I often google for phone numbers and frequently find I have to give google some kind of "clue".

My own mobile number I can reel off in a certain format starting with two digits then 3 + 4 digits. If anyone wants the number in 3+3++3 I can no longer remember it. :shock: :lol:
User avatar
Cymraes
Posts: 519
Joined: Tue Jul 07, 2015 3:31 pm
Location: North Wales

Post by Cymraes »

Interesting thank you - mine appears all over the place with spaces (which is how I always enter it) but not at all if I leave the spaces out
User avatar
Nemo
Posts: 7062
Joined: Thu Aug 14, 2008 10:15 am
Location: Norfolk

Post by Nemo »

Thanks Kev. I'm everywhere :wink: when I put spaces in but very few places with no spaces. Now added to my website in both formats.
AndrewH
Posts: 1499
Joined: Thu Sep 12, 2013 1:17 pm
Location: Kefalonia, Greece
Contact:

Post by AndrewH »

That's well worth noting. I have just searched our phone number using Bing and it came up for two of the sites we are on, but not the others. The ones that were successful were those without "+" signs, bracketed zeros, and spaces. Our own website did not appear.

I searched again using a "+" sign instead of "00" and with a space after the international code. This time other websites came up, including ours. So it is best to do like Nemo says and display more than one format if you can.
Post Reply