On-Page Phone Numbers: Text or Image?
September 13, 2011 • Article by Lizzy Lillington
It’s 1 am on Saturday morning as you carefully manouver out of a restaurant into the street. Taxi! There’s none insight. With a shaking hand you reach for your mobile and meticulously press your fingers into the touch screen as you type your email to the taxi company…
Nonsense, you wouldn’t ever do it. And neither would Google, if it were in your shoes. As it happens, Google does its best to be in your shoes, so just like you it would like to call for a taxi, preferably on a local number to make sure you are not calling a cab company in another city by mistake. And since Google can’t really read images, it would love it in text.
Google Local’s mission is to deliver a real local service to a local person. For that reason, adding to your website an indexable phone number with a local area code is an on-page trust verifier. Especially if that number coincides with the one in your Google Places account, which has already been verified with the PIN number. The same applies to the physical address, which another local identifier.
So, let’s keep the on-page phone number:
- Local
- In text
- Coherent with the Google Places one
This way, you can become Google’s favourite local business.