Using The Google Phone Book

The Google Phone Book? What? Where? How? Well, here is what I mean when I talk about using the Google Phone Book. A lot of customers would rather call you on the phone than order through your website. You want to serve these customers as well don’t you?

I realize some people do not want anyone to call them. They want people to order product through their website because they have it mostly automated. But this is not true for some website owners. They want their customers to call them, so they put their phone number prominently on their website.

But why wait until the user gets to your website? When a user types a search term into Google, they get a results page with 10 listings for them to choose from plus extra pages of listings if they want them.

There is a description meta tag in your web pages if you coded your website properly. As long as that description contains the terms the searcher typed in, that meta description is the description Google displays under your link.

So put your phone number in the description. I’ve had people call me from just that description without them having visited my website at all yet. That’s why I call the Google results page, the Google Phone Book.

In addition to that, Google snippets means that if the search phrase typed in by the user is not in your meta description, then Google pulls the description from the text around the search term where it appears on the actual page itself.

This means, you need to put your phone number in more than one place on your website in order to take advantage of the Google Phone Book.

Example: You sell three things on your website. We’ll call them Thingies, Whatchamacallits, and Whatevers.

You have your phone number at the top of your web page already.

In paragraph 1, you talk about thingies. At the end of the paragraph, put in something like; “If you want to know more gibberish about Thingies, call XXX-XXX-XXXX”.

In paragraph 2, you talk about whatchamacallits. At the end of that paragraph put; “Call XXX-XXX-XXXX to learn more about whatchamacallits”.

Now if Google pulls the description from the text on the page, it will also pull your phone number into the google results page just as it would if it pulled it from your meta description.

So, if you want people to call you, emphasize that on the web pages you build and make sure it is going into the descriptions Google displays under the link to your website on their results page. That’s what I call using the Google Phone Book.