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Friday 10 July 2015

Corporate Contacts

Use corporate contact markup on your official website to add your company's contact information to the Google Knowledge panel in some searches. Knowledge panels can prominently display your customer service phone number.
Get started quickly with these instructions for formatting and publishing the proper markup code if your company has service phone numbers that are national or global in scope.
Screenshots of customer service links

Company phone numbers

Use structured data markup embedded in your public website to specify your preferred phone numbers. You can specify the following types of phone numbers:
  • customer service
  • technical support
  • billing support
  • bill payment
  • sales
  • reservations
  • credit card support
  • emergency
  • baggage tracking
  • roadside assistance
  • package tracking
You can specify more categories of contact numbers than these, but they aren’t currently included in Google search results. For each number, you can also specify:
  • is the number toll-free?
  • is the number for the hearing-impaired?
  • does the number serve a specific country or countries?
Google algorithms will process all the phone numbers you specify and attempt to show the most relevant one in response to users’ queries. The phone numbers you include in your markup must correspond to phone numbers that users can see on the same page.

Adding structured markup to your site

The Schema.org vocabulary and JSON-LD markup format are an open standard for embedding structured data in web pages. In order for Google to recognize structured data as company contact numbers, make sure you fulfill these requirements:
  • Publish markup on a page on your company’s official website
  • Pages with markup must not be blocked from crawling by robots.txt directives
  • Include an Organization record in your markup that includes both:
    • Your organization's official URL
    • One or more ContactPoint records
Google recommends that you use JSON-LD markup. However, you can also use microdata or RDFa markup formats instead, as long as you still use the correct Schema.org types.
The Organization record is specified first. The only required properties on the Organization are url, which must be the home page of the company’s official site, and contactPoint. The value of contactPoint must be a list of nested ContactPoint records. Google considers these properties on each ContactPoint:
PropertyValue specificationExample values
@typeRequired to be "ContactPoint"."ContactPoint"
telephoneRequired. An internationalized version of the phone number, starting with the “+” symbol and country code (+1 in the US and Canada)."+1-800-555-1212" 
"+44-2078225951"
contactTypeRequired to be one of the values listed at right. These values are not case sensitive. (Additional contact types may be supported later.)"customer support" 
"technical support" 
"billing support" 
"bill payment" 
"sales" 
"reservations" 
"credit card support" 
"emergency" 
"baggage tracking" 
"roadside assistance" 
"package tracking"
areaServedOptional. The geographical region served by the number, specified as a Schema.org/AdministrativeArea. Countries may be specified concisely using just their standard ISO-3166 two-letter code, as in the examples at right. If omitted, the number is assumed to be global."US" 
"GB" 
["US","CA","MX"]
contactOptionOptional details about the phone number. Currently only the two values shown at right are supported."TollFree" 
"HearingImpairedSupported"
availableLanguageOptional details about the language spoken. Languages may be specified by their common English name. If omitted, the language defaults to English."English" 
"Spanish" 
["French", "English"]
Here is a basic template for specifying one customer service phone number:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{ "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "Organization",
  "url" : "http://www.your-company-site.com",
  "contactPoint" : [
    { "@type" : "ContactPoint",
      "telephone" : "+1-401-555-1212",
      "contactType" : "customer service"
    } ] }
</script>
You can simply customize the values with your company’s URL and customer service phone number, and insert this code into the page that shows users this phone number. If the number visible on the page is formatted differently from the markup (e.g., without a country code), that's okay.
Here is a more extensive example that illustrates multiple contact numbers for a company, including US toll-free numbers, a hearing-impaired number, and several contact categories:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{ "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "Organization",
  "url" : "http://www.t-mobile.com",
  "contactPoint" : [
    { "@type" : "ContactPoint",
      "telephone" : "+1-877-746-0909",
      "contactType" : "customer service",
      "contactOption" : "TollFree",
      "areaServed" : "US"
    } , {
      "@type" : "ContactPoint",
      "telephone" : "+1-505-998-3793",
      "contactType" : "customer service"
    } , {
      "@type" : "ContactPoint",
      "telephone" : "+1-877-296-1018",
      "contactType" : "customer service",
      "contactOption" : ["HearingImpairedSupported","TollFree"] ,
      "areaServed" : "US"
    } , {
      "@type" : "ContactPoint",
      "telephone" : "+1-877-453-1304",
      "contactType" : "technical support",
      "contactOption" : "TollFree",
      "areaServed" : ["US","CA"],
      "availableLanguage" : ["English","French"]
    } , {
      "@type" : "ContactPoint",
      "telephone" : "+1-877-453-1304",
      "contactType" : "bill payment",
      "contactOption" : "TollFree",
      "areaServed" : ["US","CA"]
    } ] }
</script>
In the JSON syntax used here, curly braces group properties of an object; square braces list multiple values of a property. Be careful with commas — they go outside the quotation marks, following every value except the last one in every object or list (see example above). Missing or extra commas are a frequent source of JSON errors!

Testing and publishing your markup

The block of structured data you produce, enclosed within the <script type="application/ld+json"> ... </script> tags, can be inserted into any HTML page on your company’s official website that is crawled and indexed by Google. We recommend inserting it into your contacts page, for ease of maintenance as phone numbers change over time, but any other page (including your home page) is also acceptable. Within the page, it may be placed in either the <HEAD> or <BODY> region. Either way, it won’t affect how your document appears in users’ web browsers.
To verify that your markup is well-formed and can be processed by Google, you should paste the HTML source of your marked-up page (or just the <script> block) into Google’s Corporate Contacts Markup Tester tool. If the tool reports “No structured data present,” then you likely have a syntax error such as a spurious comma. Otherwise, if the tool reports that any required fields are missing, please repair the data and try again.
When Google next crawls the page, its indexing algorithms will process the phone numbers from your markup and make them eligible to be used in search results. You can ask Google to crawl the page by following the instructions here. Please note that this process may take up to a week.
You can also use this technique to specify other data about your company to Google. For example, you can specify your company's official logo image as described in this Google blog post. Using the JSON-LD format, an example of markup to specify both a customer service number and an official logo image would be as follows:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{ "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "Organization",
  "url" : "http://www.your-company-site.com",
  "logo" : "http://www.example.com/logo.png",
  "contactPoint" : [
    { "@type" : "ContactPoint",
      "telephone" : "+1-401-555-1212",
      "contactType" : "customer service"
    } ] }
</script>

Troubleshooting

My corporate contact isn't displaying

The Google Knowledge Graph panel doesn’t display phone numbers for your company, even though you’ve added the markup to the company's official website.
First, check that the contact information is shown correctly with no errors in the Markup Tester tool, as described above. If all fields look correct, and you have waited at least one week since your marked-up page was last crawled by Google, report the missing events using the small “Feedback” link under the Knowledge Graph panel in Google search. Click “Wrong?” on the name of the company and explain the problem, being sure to use the term "contact information" in your description of the problem.

I don't want my corporate contact displayed

Google has a number displayed for my company, but I don’t want it listed.
Even if you don’t include this markup on your page, Google algorithms may find information that is publicly available on the web. You can use this markup to override the information Google finds automatically, but you can’t specify not to list a contact number.

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