A plea to businesses of all kinds: Reduce the contact-you friction!
Follow along as we talk telephone numbers and email addresses and the reasons they should be hyperlinked along with the best way to format the front-facing info.
To facilitate ease of communication from your website, please hyperlink telephone numbers and emails. Florida International University explains:
Why make phone numbers clickable?
Allowing every phone number on your site to be clickable improves the user experience.
The growing use of smartphones increases the odds that most of the users that access your site are doing so using their smartphones.
Hyperlinking phone numbers allows users to immediately place a call through their cell phone provider when accessing the site through their smart device. It also allows desktop users to place a call using various apps on their computer, such as Microsoft Teams or Google Hangouts.
Was this too long? Didn’t read? Hyperlink emails and telephone numbers so we don’t have to remember between your website and our phone or email app.
But wait, there’s more: OmniSearch Labs explains why we should consider using the E.164 international standard for telephone numbers. They write,
The E.164 format includes +1 — the country code shared by the United States, Canada, and parts of the Caribbean — which tells any device, anywhere, exactly where to route the call- followed by ten phone digits without spaces, hyphens, or any other separator. This isn't a preference or a best practice recommendation. The governing standard for phone number links on websites, IETF RFC 3966 (authored by Columbia University professor Henning Schulzrinne), states it plainly.
“On a public HTML page, the telephone number in the URI SHOULD always be in the global form, even if the text of the link uses some local format.”
OmniSearch Labs continues: Those using non-US SIM cards or VoIP and business calling apps may have their call fail because routing is disrupted without the E.164 format. They also state that using the standard is mandatory in some Google assets, such as Google Ads.
Finally, the marketing pros at PaperStreet suggest using known-functional telephone number formatting to avoid call failures. They write
The following are the accepted formats for displaying your phone number on your website:
(555) 555-5555
555-555-5555
555 555 5555
The following are unacceptable formats and should be avoided at all costs:
5555555555
555.555.5555
The reason being is that it’s not yet certain if Google and other search engines can understand these formats properly. Also, these formats can be less friendly for mobile visitors. It might not prompt the click-to-call functionality as smoothly compared to standard formats.
Also, if you’re using Schema.org markup for your local business information which includes your phone number, Google expects the phone number in proper formatting to help with any rich results it chooses to display.
Learning opp
Introduction to Plain Language: Make Your Communication Clear, Inclusive, and Impactful, September 22
