How often do you search for the phone number or the location of a business you want to reach? A company’s location, opening hours and phone number are common local queries.

You can often find this information in a “contact us” section of a company’s website. Google tries to identify these pages to extract relevant information from them to help searchers. There are some recommendations for helping Google identify and surface this information you should not neglect.

National phone numbers for many companies are displayed prominently in Google Search results. Recently Google started to support the schema.org markup to help you specify your preferred phone numbers using structured data markup embedded in your website.

How to specify your phone numbers to Google

Google currently supports four types of phone numbers:

  • Customer service
  • Technical support
  • Billing support
  • Bill payment

You can specify that the number is toll-free, suitable for the hearing-impaired, and whether the number is global or serves specific countries.

Remember that pages with structured data markup must not be blocked to Googlebots by the robots.txt file. You should include an Organization record in your markup with your organization’s official URL and one or more ContactPoint records.

The Organization record is specified first. The value of ContactPoint must be a list of nested ContactPoint records. Google considers these properties on each ContactPoint:

Property Value specification Example values
@type Required to be “ContactPoint”. “ContactPoint”
telephone Required. An internationalized version of the phone number, starting with the “+” symbol and country code (+1 in the US and Canada). “+1-866-793-2236”
contactType Required to be one of the four values listed before. These values are not case sensitive. “customer support”
“technical support”
“billing support”
“bill payment”
areaServed Optional. The geographical region served by the number, specified as a schema.org/
AdministrativeArea. Countries may be specified concisely using just their standard ISO-3166 two-letter code, as in the examples on the right. If omitted, the number is assumed to be global.		 “US”
“GB”
contactOption Optional details about the phone number. Currently only the two values shown at right are supported by Google. “TollFree”
availableLanguage Optional details about the language spoken. Languages may be specified by their common English name. If omitted, the language defaults to English. “English”
“Spanish”
“French”

Here is an example for specifying one customer service phone number:

<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{ “@context” : “http://schema.org”,
“@type” : “Organization”,
“url” : “http://www.your-company-site.com”,
“contactPoint” : [
{ “@type” : “ContactPoint”,
“telephone” : “+1-866-793-2236”,
“contactType” : “customer service”
} ] }
</script>

You can easily change the values in bold to your company’s URL and customer service phone number, and insert this code into the page that shows this phone number.

We recommend inserting this code into your contact page. Within the page, it may be placed in either the <HEAD> or <BODY> region.

Note: Verify your markup with the help of the Schema Markup Validator tool.

Next time Google crawls your page with the markup, it’ll process the phone number and make them eligible to be used in special search results.

For optimizing your site and ensuring your structured data is correctly implemented, consider using WebCEO’s Online SEO Tools to analyze and enhance your website’s SEO performance, including structured data optimization for better visibility in search results.