Google is using information from the “location pages” of businesses to collect specific data about local businesses and return this information directly in the search results page. Google announced in a blog post, that it is now supporting improved schema markup, rich snippets for location pages.

Webmasters can include and mark up the address, opening hours, phone numbers and departments within a store so that Google can identify and surface this information.

Add Business Phone Numbers to Your Search Listings: Google is launching support for schema.org markup to help businesses specify their preferred phone numbers using structured data markup embedded on the website. Four types of phone numbers are prominently displayed in the knowledge graph: customer service, technical support, billing support, and bill payment. It can be specified whether the number is toll-free, for the hearing-impaired and whether the number is global or serves particular countries. Google will sort out the most relevant ones in the search results in response to the users’ queries. For Google to recognize structured data as company contact numbers:

  • Publish markup on a page on your company’s official website
  • Pages with markup must not be blocked to the Googlebot by robots.txt
  • Include an Organization record in your markup with:
    • Your organization's official url
    • One or more "ContactPoint" records.

Google Launches Support for Schema Markup to Add Phone Numbers and Business Information to your Search listings

Learn how to specify your national customer service numbers here.

Add Business Information to Your Search Listings: On the “Contact Us” or branch locater page of your website, you can now include additional markup to address of the business, phone numbers, opening hours and other information. You can even categorize it by services or departments. Google has provided a set of recommendations on the best practices to make the location pages easily accessible to Googlebot. The recommendations cover crawling, indexing and visual layout suggestions, as well as new structured data markup guidelines to help Google index pages more accurately. To learn more on how to build great location pages read Google's complete set of recommendations.

Google Launches Support for Schema Markup to Add Phone Numbers and Business Information to your Search listings

Author

Ritu from PageTraffic is a qualified Google Ads Professional and Content Head at PageTraffic. She has been the spear head for many successful Search Marketing Campaigns and currently oversees Content Marketing operations of PageTraffic in India.