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.
Phone number SEO
- kevsboredagain
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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.
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.