Here's a small thing that costs real money.
Open your website on your phone. Find your phone number. Tap it.
Did it start a call? If it didn't, that number is a picture of a phone number. Every customer who wants to call you has to memorize it, close your site, open their phone app, and type it in — and some percentage of them simply won't.
How to check yours in thirty seconds
Do this on an actual phone, not on your computer. On a laptop a phone number link often does nothing visible, so a desktop test tells you almost nothing.
- Open your site on your phone and tap the number at the top of the page.
- Your phone should immediately offer to dial. If nothing happens, that one's broken.
- Scroll to the bottom and tap the number in the footer. A lot of sites get one right and the other wrong, because they were built at different times by different people.
- Tap anything that says Call or Contact. A button that looks like a call button and quietly opens a contact form instead is worse than no button, because the customer who wanted to talk to you now has to type.
Why it happens
Usually one of two reasons. Either the number is baked into an image (a banner or a logo), so there's no text to tap. Or it's text, but nobody wrapped it in a link.
The fix
It's one line. The number needs to be a link that starts with tel: — so
<a href="tel:+18597499717">(859) 749-9717</a>. Any web person can do this in
about two minutes. If you're on a site builder like Wix or Squarespace, there's usually a "phone"
link option in the link menu.
While you're in there: put the number somewhere it's visible without scrolling, and consider a bar that sticks to the bottom of the screen on phones. That's what I do on every site I build, and it's the single highest-value pixel on a local business website.
Four mistakes I see over and over
The number lives inside the logo. If your phone number is part of an image file, there is no text there to tap, to copy, or to read aloud to somebody who uses a screen reader. Google can't read it either. Whatever the designer's reason was, it costs you calls.
The link has the number typed the pretty way. What the customer sees should be
(859) 749-9717, but what the link points at should be plain digits with the country
code: tel:+18597499717. Spaces, dashes and parentheses inside the link itself are what
makes a tap fail on some phones and work on others, which is why this bug is so easy to miss — it
probably works fine on yours.
The number on the site doesn't match the number on Google. If your website says one number and your Google Business Profile says another, you've split your own reputation between two numbers. Google uses that kind of consistency as a signal, and more practically, a customer who finds the wrong one just thinks you've moved. Pick one number and use it everywhere.
It's only in one place. A customer decides to call at a moment you can't predict — after the photos, after the reviews, halfway through your prices. The number should be at the top of the page, at the bottom of the page, and on a bar that follows them down the screen on a phone.
What about tracking numbers?
Some marketers will put a different phone number on your website so calls can be counted. It does work, and if somebody's running paid ads for you there's a real argument for it. But understand the trade: you now have a number in the world that isn't yours, and if that service ever lapses, the number on your website stops ringing anywhere. I'd rather count calls in your Google listing and keep one real number everywhere, but that's a preference, not a rule.
This is the kind of thing I'll just tell you for free if you ask. It takes me two minutes to spot and it isn't worth an invoice.