Working around a Call Center for Google listings

[Eric Rohrback]

I have a national client with many franchise locations, and we want to get them set up with Google Places listings. The only problem is that they're currently routing all calls to a call center instead of each location. That creates less overhead for the franchises, and make sure the work is getting done. I know Google dislikes call centers, so is there a way around this so I can get this client local listings?

 

[mborgelt]

Unique phone numbers for each location are pretty important to rank on Google. I usually see that if a company using the same phone number for all of their listings, they are seen as duplicates by Google and have a lot of trouble ranking.

If you use tracking numbers, you might find a good solution to forward calls to your center, and you might have a better idea on which listings are giving you the most leads. Tracking numbers can cause headaches though because you need to make sure your citations are consistent with that phone number.

I hope this helps