Google has released some recommendations for webmastesr to help them get the search engine to identify and surface business info like phone numbers, business locations, and opening hours. They also launched support for schema.org to help specify preferred phone numbers using structured data markup.
“Many people also turn to Google to find and discover local businesses, and the best information is often on a website’s contact us or branch locator page. These location pages typically include the address of the business, the phone number, opening hours, and other information,” says Google in a blog post.
“In addition to building great location pages, businesses are encouraged to continue using Places for Business, which is a fast and easy way to update your information across Google’s service such as Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph and AdWords campaigns,” it adds.
You can find the recommendations for location pages for local businesses and organizations here. It goes into how to have each location’s info accessible, how to let Googlebot discover, crawl and index location pages, Havascript and other page assets, how location info should be presented, and using schema.org markup.
Schema.org supports four types of phone numbers: customer service, technical support, billing support, bill payment. For each one, you must indicate if it’s toll-free, suitable for the hearing-impaired, and whether it’s global or only for specific countries. More on all this here.
Image via Google
