Customers are often looking for ways to contact businesses, and Google works to show the best available information to help them in a variety of ways. You can help us with this by following several best practices that help ensure we're showing the most accurate information for your business or service.
In turn, following these best practices helps ensure that people are directly contacting a business, rather than reaching a third-party claiming to have an authorized relationship that can't be verified. It also helps Google direct people to correct support mechanisms, such as listing a company's support telephone number rather than a general switchboard number.
One way you can help Google show the most accurate information for your business is by adding a contact or support page to your website. Be sure to provide a contact or support page that can be easily located by both visitors and Googlebot. For example, for visitors, it might be useful to provide a link to your contact page at the bottom of your home page, or from within an easily found menu option. Googlebot can usually find the page when it crawls and indexes your site. In addition, you can also include your contact page in yoursitemap.
It is important to be clear and concise about the ways that you offer support on your website. This includes methods such as email, chat, social media, telephone, or other methods. It is helpful to Google and your customers to have an official phone number with recorded information about your support options. If you work with authorized third parties to offer support, consider listing these on your support page. This will help your customers know that the support is legitimate. If you don't work with third parties, make that clear as well.
If you want your support or contact page to appear in a featured snippet on Google, there are a few things you can do. First, make sure the page is well-written and informative. Google will try to show the most relevant material in featured snippets, but they're not always perfect. If there's information on your website that you don't want to appear in a featured snippet, you can use the data-nosnippet tag to prevent it from being displayed. Finally, if you're a local business, create a Google Business Profile and make sure it profiles the best information. You can also consider making use of structured data for local businesses.
If you have questions about Google Search, you can reach out to the Google Search Central Community or Danny Sullivan on Twitter. The Google Search Central Community is a forum where you can ask questions and get help from experts. Danny Sullivan is the Search Liaison for Google, and he can help you with any questions you have about search.