Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Another company is coming up in search results when I type in my phone number
-
If I search for my client's phone number on Google, without gaps, ie 02036315541, another company comes up at the top of the list. This company has a similar name to ours, but it is in a different town and it does different things. My company name is Energy Contract Renewals https://www.energycontractrenewals.co.uk/ and their company is https://energyrenewals.co.uk. As far as I can see, the other company does not mention our phone number anywhere on their site or on their GMB page so I don't know why they are coming up. We do not come up at all for this search.
However, if I put our phone number in like this: 020 3631 5541, our company does come up and the other company does not.
Anyone know how I can correct this or if it is even possible to do something about it?
-
My pleasure, Maureen!
I'm so glad you asked about Moz Local. We have a whole new-and-improved Moz Local now, and yes, we are definitely supporting the UK. See more here: https://moz.com/help/moz-local
Please write to help@moz.com if you have any questions about what we can do for your clients in the UK, and I'm so glad you found help in the forum.
-
Hi Miriam
Thank you for your very full reply, I appreciate your help. I agree with you it is a low priority and I have pointed this out to the client! The suggestion that Shannon made has already started to produce results and I agree with you that the website needs to have more links and a higher domain authority. We have recently taken over the website and are busy adding content to it as it was quite meagre in its content. Earning backlinks is our next objective.
Question: does Moz Local now work for UK businesses? A couple of years ago I used it for a client and when it came up for renewal I was told by Moz that it no longer supported UK businesses. So Moz gave me a refund as it had accepted online payment for the renewal. I had assumed it still didn't support UK businesses, but if you're saying it does, that's a whole other ball game! Please could you advise on this as I have several clients that would benefit from Moz Local.
Thanks again for all your help.
best regards, Maureen
-
Hi Maureen,
Thank you for bringing your question to the forum. I have a few of thoughts on this:-
First of all, folks are very unlikely to be seeking your business or your services by entering a phone number. So, I would call this concern a very low priority.
-
However, here's what I think may be going on, as I was unable to immediately find anything connecting your phone number with your competitor (something may exist somewhere, but you'd need to hunt to find it if it does): I suspect Google is confused. The similarity in business names and domain names is leading Google to be uncertain about the identity of the business connected with that phone number. Because your competitor has earned more links and has a higher Domain Authority than your business, Google (in their uncertainty) is bringing their SERP entry up above yours. It's certainly weird behavior on their part (if, indeed, there is no asset connecting your number with their business hiding somewhere). But, that's my best guess. Somewhere in Google's system, they are confused about the identities of the two businesses and are conflating them with the same phone number in your phone number search.
-
What to do about this? According to Moz, your numbers stack up against your competitor's like this:
Them:
Page Authority: 25 ; Domain Authority: 19 ; Links: 911
You:
Page Authority: 5 ; Domain Authority: 3 ; Links: 2
As these numbers indicate, your brand is behind in building overall authority, and this is why I strongly suspect that Google is allowing this business to get into the mix of your search engine results because they aren't quite sure whether the competitor's stronger presence is actually a better version of your own business. This is my theory, anyway, and if correct, what you need to do is build up the authority of your domain so that it is firmly associated in Google's mind with your phone number.
You need more links, in short, and, as others have mentioned here, you may well need to start building out your citation set. Moz Local would be our home-grown solution for a UK business like yours needing to ensure that its local platform and directory listings are accurate and complete . You can learn more about it here: https://moz.com/products/local
- Back to the beginning of this: it's unlikely that your brand is being harmed much (if at all) by what you've noticed regarding the phone number. People just don't typically search for brands or services by phone number. But, there is a good chance that your low authority is causing you to be outranked for the keywords that people DO search for in trying to access services like yours. And, what you've noticed is actually a good indicator that Google currently lacks confidence in the information they have about your business. That definitely matters, and so, the best way to build up Google's confidence is to grow your authority. I recommend that you put priority focus on both links and local business listings and that should be a smart start to making Google more confident about who your business is (and who it isn't!).
Hope this helps!
-
-
Hi Colemckeon, thanks very much for your suggestions. I will look for a directory service in the UK as I think those you mentioned might just be for the USA.
-
Maureen,
Shannon gave some great suggestions, but I would also recommend using a directory service to make sure that your number is in the same format through all the business directories you are listed with.
In addition to that, I would recommend submitting your number to a service like white pages reverse number look up or true caller.
It is best to have as many people referencing your phone number as possible so the people searching for you can verify that its you.
Funny side note... If you Google "Call google my business" googles phone number doesn't even show up, but an irrelevant third party companies number does!
-
Although the part I don't understand is how does Google get confused between 2 companies on the basis of a phone number which does not appear on the other company's website anyway?
-
Thanks Shannon, those are all great suggestions, I will try them out. Many thanks
-
A few ideas/questions for you:
1. Have you tried adding a phone number on your home page without the spaces? The front page on your website only includes the phone number WITH the spaces. It might look odd, but you could try putting the phone without spaces into your footer, perhaps near your copyright or the address.
2. Have you tried updating your business on Google? Updating your own GMB profile can help you appear in results and make sure Google isn't confusing you with this other similarly-named company. https://www.google.com/business/
3. Also I took a peek at your search results and when I checked your business on Google Maps, your phone shows up with spaces but also with a +44 code in the beginning. I wonder if that could be part of the issue as well.
Hope one of these ideas help!
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
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
Seeing URL Slugs as search result titles
I've been seeing some search results for my site that look like the first result here, where the URL slug is used as SERP title: https://drive.google.com/a/fitsmallbusiness.com/file/d/0B37y4RslpuY-a0hQYjlJQ0NxeFJicDF6RVlURFVSNFN0aGhB/view?usp=sharing The article title (and Yoast snippet title) are both "28 Press Release Examples From The Pros", but for some reason I'm seeing "press-release-examples" in the search results. I've seen this for multiple articles, and I see it now and then with different articles. I'm aware that Google often changes the titles in search results, but it seems very weird to me that they would opt for just the URL slug here. Thoughts? Has anyone else seen this issue? Any idea what might be causing this? All help much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | davidwaring0 -
Should a sub domain be a separate property in the Search Console?
We're launching a blog on a sub-domain of a corp site (blog.corpsite.com). We already have corpsite.com set up in the Search Console. Should I set up a separate property for this sub-domain in the Search Console (WMT) in order to manage it? Is it necessary? Thanks, JM
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Sudden jump in the number of 302 redirects on my Squarespace Site
My Squarespace site www.thephysiocompany.com has seen a sudden jump in 302 redirects in the past 30 days. Gone from 0-302 (ironically). They are not detectable using generic link redirect testing sites and Squarespace have not explanation. Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Jcoley0 -
Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?
On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.
Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson1 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
Links under Meta Description when performing a search
Doing research for clients, I have came across seeing sites displaying hyperlinks underneath their own meta description. keywords that I have googled that result with hyperlinks displaying under meta descriptions: Google'd: iacquire (brand) bmw wheels (Beyern Wheels, position 1) aftermarket bmw wheels (MMR Wheels, position 2) These companys have hyperlinks underneath their descriptions. Anyone have any ideas why this happens or how it happens?
Technical SEO | | frnprz0 -
How to remove my cdn sub domins on Google search result?
A few months ago I moved all my Wordpress images into a sub domain. After I purchased CDN service, I again moved that images to my root domain. I added User-agent: * Disallow: / to my CDN domain. But now, when I perform site search on the Google, I found that my CDN sub domains are indexed by the Google. I think this will make duplicate content issue. I already hit by the Panguin. How do I remove these search results on Google? Should I add my cdn domain to webmaster tools to request URL removal request? Problem is, If I use cdn.mydomain.com it shows my www.mydomain.com. My blog:- http://goo.gl/58Utt site search result:- http://goo.gl/ElNwc
Technical SEO | | Godad1