: Phone number in meta description bad or good for local rankings NAP Once again I'm at it with increasing people's local rankings and I've learnt so much about local rankings in the past 2
Once again I'm at it with increasing people's local rankings and I've learnt so much about local rankings in the past 2 weeks it feels like my brain is gonna pop anyway, question is fairly simple for someone who engages in local rankings and I appreciate the question may be a little guess work but isn't SEO mostly guessing anyway?
From what I've read and learned that Google works of a system called nap for local rankings (With many other factors but this question is purely based on NAP). For people who care about local rankings NAP stands for Name of Business / Address of Business / Phone Number for Business.
Now what what I've read you don't need the whole NAP to be on one website, a P or just a N can help towards your local rankings. It's believed that NAP rewards more than just P and N for example but knowing Google they might have a diversity checker which is my concern what your get to in a moment.
Now of course sites weight differently where your business is posted, it's certainly going to be more credible if your NAP details are on your national phone book than say a blog site, so taking in this consideration too.
Pure Guess (Not apart of the question but none the less makes a good read on my belief).
Now my guess work would make me believe that the formula would look something like (N)+(A)+(P)x(T)
So (N)name would be 1 or 0 to indicate present or not
So (A)dress would be 1 or 0 to indicate present or not
So (P)hone would be 1 or 0 to indicate present or not
So (T)rust would be 1-100 to indicate level of trust
So a phone number appearing on youtube might look something like 0+0+1x95= 95 and a NAP appearing on your national phone book might look something like 1+1+1x100= 300
Please note that I'm not saying this is the sole factor and I'm sure its way more complex that this with things like other factors on the page, off the page (Reviews, Links, Clicks) and so on but its still a contributor).
The Question
My question is fairly simple and I'd imagine hard to impossible to have an actual definite answer to this but maybe someone has seen official wording else where on this, is it bad to include address or phone number in the Meta Description? The reason I ask is that one of my competitors has these elements in the meta descriptions and their local rankings are absolutely superb, the problem I have with this is scrap bot sites like 'Similar Too' 'Seo Rankings' and 1,000's of the other scrap box networks that scrap site and then make urls with your site information are mostly limited to your meta description what this means that your phone number, address and sometimes even your company name if the domain is exact will appear as AP, and even NAP on thousands of websites.
So, is it a bad strategy to include phone number and address in meta description, everything I read into would suggest its good of course with the downside of maybe lowering quality of description for click thoughts but top rankings would increase this 10 folds anyhow..
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Aloha Simon, I actually follow you. :)
Anyhow, there are a lot of he said, she said, Google said in regards to SEO.
What I have noticed from experience.
Adding an area code has worked small wonders in the meta description.
The reason being people are actually searching IE. "custom auto body shops 209"
They tend to use it more as an extended search opposed to saying the county after extending it past a city search.
Adding a complete phone number.
As you mentioned there are sites that scrape the info and post it. This is ok as they are only posting numbers and general business info. Google knows how your site/number is being presented and/or backlinked. I have never noticed a drop or increase based on that alone. A phone number is something you should already have and if one searches it for whatever reason, you will show up and so will the number scraped sites. Again that's fine because it only validates the business is whom they claim to be.
Your number is on the site already
I assume every site should have a number listing already so it won't stop other sites scraping your site and again should not hurt you.
As for the address
Like numbers I do not think the full details should be used. Except for a contact page and as an address.
How I have done it with best results is this.
Use schema coded cards and use full details in there ( IE, person/business, position, number, address etc.
In the meta I use something like this
Title: Custom Auto Body Shop San Jose, CA 95136 | (408) 555-1212
Description: ABC is a professional custom auto body shop located in San Jose, CA 95136. Call (408) 555-1212 Free Estimates.
I have gotten incredible results from this method and use the same concept when creating multiple city page listings.
Believe it or not some of the sites I have done this way are listed up to 5 times on the search listings first page.
Note: As you can see adding a number creates a CTA on the search results and for some businesses that info is enough for them to call you without visiting your page. So it is something to keep in mind with Analytics if you are heavy into that info as well.
Meta description is not used as a ranking factor by Google. If memory serves, I think they announced that in 2009 and there are Matt Cutts videos that discuss it on YouTube.
That said, it is important for user experience and click through rates so do whatever makes sense in context for your users. Truth be told, a lot of local businesses might prefer if the person didn't click on the result and instead just picked up the phone and called straight from the SERP, which can cause problems if you rely on analytics too heavily in evaluation of effectiveness.
Althought Google and other search engines index META tags and they more heavily index microdata/micro formats and richdata. So, although it's not bad to have your phone number in your META tags, it's better to have them marked up inline. This also helps Google et. al. to add them to their other services such as maps.
An example of their use from Google's documentation which might help you is:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
<span itemprop="name">L'Amourita Pizza</span>
Located at
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">123 Main St</span>,
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Albuquerque</span>,
<span itemprop="addressRegion">NM</span>.
</div>
<img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" />
Phone: <span itemprop="telephone">206-555-1234</span>
<a href="http://pizza.example.com/" itemprop="url">http://pizza.example.com</a>
</div>
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