If you haven’t been using any rich markup schema on your website, you’re missing out on some opportunities for search engines to better semantically understand your website. At the very minimum, most site should use authorship markup.
Site owners concerned with local SEO should really be taking a look at it. But now there’s a new reason. Googlebot is better learning how to understand business location information like specific phone numbers for departments or multiple locations.
Recently announced, Google launched support for new schema.org markup that helps your organization define specific preferred phone numbers when listed on your website.
Out of the gate, the new schema is supporting different phone numbers for:
- Customer service
- Technical support
- Billing support
- Bill payment
Here’s an example:
Itemprop parameters also allow you to indicate:
- if a number is toll-free
- if TTY/TDD service is available for deaf or hard-of-hearing
- if the number is specific to a country, certain countries, or is global
Google is recommending this new schema, along with other schema for hours of operation, address, and other information, be placed on a business’ location page. To help take the confusion out of the process for adding this markup, Google has updated Webmasters guidelines with recommendations for creating location pages for local businesses and organizations.
Businesses with multiple locations should truly benefit from this new schema format. In the age of location-aware, semantic search, it’s ever-important to have the search engines understand your business, be it department-specific or location-specific.