Each day people use Google search to find business information. People commonly enter search queries to find a business’ location, customer service phone number, and hours of operation.

This information is usually located in the “contact us” area of a site or a business location page. When Google is able to locate these pages and gather the associated data from them, there is a greater chance that this information will be properly displayed when users are trying to find a business using Google search.

We will provide you with some of Google’s recommendations that will help them to identify this pertinent information so it can be displayed in their search results.

Business Phone Number

Telephone numbers for many businesses are prominently displayed in Google’s search results.
Google now supports schema.org markup that will assist you in specifying your preferred business phone numbers by using structured data markup on your site. Schema.org markup currently supports 4 kinds of telephone numbers.

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

You can also indicate if a phone number is toll-free, global, country specific, or usable by the hearing impaired.

Local Business Recommendations

People will frequently use Google search to find local businesses.  The information they seek is frequently on the website’s branch locator or contact us page. These pages usually include the telephone number, business address, hours of operation, and additional information.

Google has also has provided recommendations on the optimal way to create these pages so that they are easy for Googlebot to access and understand, and so that users can also easily access this information.  Follow this link to learn about Google’s recommendations https://developers.google.com/webmasters/business-location-pages/.

Google’s recommendations describe visual layout, crawling and indexing guidelines as well as their schema.org markup guidelines so that they can more accurately index your pages. Here are Google’s recommendations for using markup https://developers.google.com/webmasters/business-location-pages/schema.org-examples.

Along with creating location pages, businesses should use Places for Business, which will serve to update your data on all of Google’s services such as the Knowledge Graph and Google Maps.  For more information on Places for Business, follow this link https://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/.

This post is a brief synopsis of Google’s recommendations for creating location pages. For more in depth and detailed information, follow the links we have provided above.