Internet Marketing Strategy #800: Toll Free Number
Posted in: Internet Marketing Strategies by Fran on January 24, 2011
Can a Toll Free number help improve page rank? Can it be helpful to your internet marketing strategy? This question, from what I have seen is a bit of a debate like most things in internet marketing.
For starters, if you are selling products to a national audience then having a Toll Free # is a must, from a usability and customer service point of view. 1800-Flowers is the best example of this. That company was built around the Toll Free number.
The question I am addressing is how does the Toll Free # help a site from an SEO, or Page Rank point of view.
One school of thought is that a Toll Free # does not help, and could even hurt your Page Rank. The thinking is that nowadays, getting a Toll Free number is simple and inexpensive, and any fly by night website can put one up – giving the site a feel of a national respectable company, when it fact it may not be. According to this line of reasoning, Google prefers to see a local phone #, with an area code matching the address. In this case, Google knows that there is a real physical address, and makes the business more legit.
The above approach makes much sense. There are 2 points that make me consider the other side of the arguement.
When I added a Toll Free Number to my site, my Page Rank jumped up one number. This is admittedly circumstantial evidence at best. It could have gone up for many other factors, and this was just a coincidence. The truth is, I won’t know.
The second point is a little stronger, and it is only my humble opinion. If you are able to get a customized Toll Free # (usually referred to as a vanity Toll Free number), it can give you an excuse to put a good keyword on every page of your site, in the header where your Toll Free # is listed.
For example, if your site was a site about internet marketing, a highly competitive area, and you could secure a Toll Free # such as 1 800 473 6772. This number can be translated into 1-800- 4-SEO-PPC. You could now put both these numbers on every page in your header. You would now have (another) legitimate reason to have the keywords SEO and PPC on each and every page of your site, in the header.
In the case of this site, our 800 # ends in BUZZ. This is admittedly less effective as BUZZ is not a keyword. However, it helps us from a branding perspective.
There is good news and a reason I am writing about this now. They have just released a new block of 800 numbers. The new block is 1 855. Until now, if you secured a 800 # or 888, it was likely a recycled 800 #, and you could have received a lot of junk calls (people calling an old number looking for a different business). With the new block of 855 #s, there will be no previous history, so you will get fewer erroneous calls.
I use a service called Callture, located in Toronto, Canada. 
Their service is reliable, and the customer service has been responsive. Best of all, a Toll Free # costs about $2.00 a month plus usage. There may be a cost for vanity #. You can forward it to any phone #. There is an online dashboard so you are in full control of the number. You can also check out the availability of 800# numbers via a tool on their site. To read more about this company, check out the information on our recommended third party services page -for Callture.
