Phone number for SEO
-
We have had an interesting question from a client. They have asked if removing their phone number from their website would have an affect on their rankings. Our immediate answer was 'No' but it may affect the Brand, Usability and Customer experience by restricting the methods of contact. This then made us think that perhaps then it could have an effect in the long term. This situation is also complicated by the fact that they do not have a Google Local Plus account for operational, sensitivity reasons (they don't want to openly publicise their address)
We believe that there shouldn't be any negative affect but thought we would open a discussion. Thanks in advance for any comments/ideas.
-
Thanks for the responses. It was my opinion that technically it should not affect anything but with the current direction of SEO and the potential affects of Engagement as ranking factors I thought it might be interesting to discuss.
Appreciate your comments....thanks
-
Hi Jeff
I would rather not identify the specific business.
The reason for removing the phone number is because it is a mobile number and the nature of the business means that they may get calls from other countries. This means the phone is ringing at any time of the day.
I agree it is not ideal but they do not have a landline number and a business phone cannot be manned all of the time. It is a strange set up but they are quite a small business and certainly not a typical client.
thanks for you comments
-
What business are they in that they wouldn't benefit from having a phone number? With the exception of large companies like Google and Yelp, who have to hide their phone numbers deep within their websites because of the sheer volume they get that doesn't actually help their business, I don't see why you would want to hide that. And even if you aren't a local business you can always benefit from some "local SEO" to help your presence a little bit. We even took this a step further and made our contact phone number texting compatible and it has helped a ton from a customer experience perspective.
Again, this is all dependent on the business because I know there are exceptions. But to answer your question directly, no I don't think that removing the phone number will hurt your organic results directly and I think that you can get away with not having a phone number on the site (if it makes sense for the business of course).
-
Eddie,
I believe if they are not focussing on Local SEO, there will be no effect on their rankings. Yes, I agree it's not good for the visitors if they don't find any mean of communication and this might affect them in a long run.
Umar
-
I think Remove Phone Number will not affect SEO, and if we talk about Google business page, after verified the business by Google, you can remove the phone number and address from your Google Business Page.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Rankings Ebbs and Flows on Ecommerce Site - Normal?
Hey everyone, I should start by saying I'm very new to SEO (I'm actually just a copywriter that's taken on this role at an agency), so I apologize if I'm using some common terms incorrectly or if there's a lack of information. I've been optimizing my first ecommerce website (clothing company), and things were going very well last year. Strong surges in organic traffic, peaking in the summer. There was a drop before the holidays when the client dumped a ton of new product pages that weren't optimized. After optimizing the pages, the traffic went back up to its summer levels. Now, there's about a 10% drop in organic traffic since earlier this year, and a loss of just over 20% of keywords the site was originally ranking for. There's no sharp drop in the Analytics, but a steady decline. To give a better idea, the site was ranking for 5,270 keywords in February; it's dropped to 3,772 keywords in April. According to SEMRush, almost all the dropped keywords are the lower volume ones, maybe indicating long tail keywords? I'm really not sure what the cause of the drop is, as I've been following (I think) best on-page practices, which seems to have yielded results last year. One thing I should mention is the client has a unique product page for each variant of one product (so the same shirt will have 10 of the same pages, the only difference being the colour). Could Google be penalizing the site for duplicate content? It was fine last year though with that same site structure; I'm not sure how long it would take for Google to penalize a site for that. Sorry for the wall of text. I'd really appreciate any insight into this. Thanks Moz community!
On-Page Optimization | | EdenPrez3 -
Best SEO experts you know in India Chennai
Best SEO experts you know in India Chennai. Does anyone know of few companies who deal with SEO to help optimize keywords? and get more traffic for our website? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | bsharath0 -
Looking for someone (not a huge company) to do SEO for my eCommerce Webshop.
Hi, the title pretty much explains everything. Just send me a message with an email adress and we'll get in contact! regards, Walter
On-Page Optimization | | Walterman0 -
Do parameters in a URL make a difference from an SEO point of view
We us a number of different parameters in a number of our URLs to track how the user has navigated to the page. So for example we will have a page www.example.com/product/?banner to show that the user has navigated to the page from the banner as opposed to www.example.com/product/?footer to show that the user has navigated to the page from the footer. Do search engines treat these pages as the same page or different pages? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | cbarron0 -
Are lots of wordpress tags hurting my SEO?
When I started my blog 4 years ago and didn't know what I was doing, I set it up to be organized using tags (no categories). I have around 20 tags and around 250 articles. Each blog article typically has 2-4 tags associated with it. There is a lot of topic overlap and putting each post in only one category wouldn't work. I have been no indexing, do follow my tag pages because they are just a list of post titles, but I'm wondering if the whole situation is hurting my SEO. On my homepage I have a sidebar menu/list of all the tags so I have link juice going to no indexed (but dofollow) pages. Reducing the number of tags would be bad for user experience because people who were looking for info on a specific topic wouldn't be as easily able to find what they want. Ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | KateV0 -
Telephone numbers on page getting classed as 404s by SEOMoz
Hi there, I have a number of clients who have their telephone numbers on their sites (understandably of course!) and SEOmoz is classing them as links and therefore a 404 in the crawl software. The protocol is added in the code so if viewing the page on a mobile you can call the client. Should I be doing anything else? Webmaster does not pick these up as 404s so I am wondering if this is an SEOmoz bug or that I should be adding a no-follow? Thanks jT
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
New sitelinks - can we control the number?
A quick question on Google's new sitelink format. When searching for our brand name (Confetti) Google returns 8 sitelinks for our site. When searching for our domain (confetti.co.uk) Google returns the maximum number of 12 sitelinks. Is there a quick way (Webmaster Tools for example) to increase the number of sitelinks for our brand name to 12? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
Is an Overflow SEO friendly
Is an "overflow" (scrollbar) seo and Google friendly? I only ask because it hides part of the visible text.
On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst0