Everyone in business has an 800, 888, 877 or some kind of toll-free number right? Most everyone has a web address as well or they should (that’s a topic for another day) right?
So what does having an 800 number have to do with finding opportunities using Google?
Do this one thing before continuing to read this post: enter your 800 (toll-free) number into the search box on Google and click on the Search button.
I did this for the company I work for and had 40,100 search results returned. The 1st 2 results on page 1 were pages from our web site with a total of 4 results on the 1st page. I must be doing something right SEO wise.
Now comes the fun part – by visually scanning the first couple of pages of results I found no less than (5) five sites that had our phone number listed but not our web address. Let’s let that sink in for a few seconds.
1… 2… 3… 4… 5…
Can you see where I’m going with this? If you answered yes then you’re already ahead of the game.
Here we have an opportunity to link build without cold calling / emailing etc… These sites already have us listed for one reason or another. It’s now up to me to decide what landing page on our site will best fit their content and make a call. It’s obvious that not all sites will be a good fit as some are just robot collections of other peoples content but you can do a quick visual of the Google results listing to help you in that regard.
There are two other things to look out for here as well:
1) Have you changed your 800 number? If so then that old number is out there and someone else is getting your calls. Search your old 800 number and contact as many of the sites to change it and while you’re there get them to update or add your web address.
2) Have you changed site domains or removed old content from your current domain? Then there are old links is out there pointing to nowhere.
There are two ways to handle this:
1) Call the site that has the old link and give them an updated one.
2) Do a 301 redirect (google results) from the deleted content to a replacement page or from the old domain to the new domain.
So what have we learned here? Don’t neglect old established content, some of this may be ranking very high organically and costing you lost customers.
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