The phone number on your shop's website that nobody can tap
A common repair shop website mistake: the phone number is an image or plain text, so a driver on a phone cannot call in one tap. How to spot and fix it.
A driver with a check engine light pulls into a parking lot and looks up repair shops on their phone. They open your website, see your phone number in the header, and tap it. Nothing happens. They try again, give up, and go back to Google to call the next shop.
This happens on a surprising number of repair shop websites. It is one of the most common mistakes we see, and it usually takes less than an hour to fix.
Why it happens
There are three usual causes.
The number is part of an image. Many older shop sites have a header graphic with the logo, a slogan and the phone number all baked into one picture. It looks fine on a laptop. On a phone, it is just a picture.
The number is plain text, not a link. Some phones detect phone numbers automatically and make them tappable, but not every browser does it reliably, and some site builders block it. A number that is not coded as a call link is a gamble.
The number is only on the contact page. The homepage has a "Contact us" button that opens a form. The driver wants to talk to someone now, not wait for a reply to a form.
Why it matters more for repair shops
Repair shop searches skew mobile and urgent. Someone with a grinding noise, a dead battery or a warning light is usually searching from a phone, often from the car itself. They want to call, ask "can you look at it today," and get an answer.
A few seconds of friction sends them to the next shop. And the next shop is close. The median repair shop in our data has 44 Google reviews, so most drivers see several reasonable options in the map pack. Your website is often the tiebreaker.
Meanwhile 44.3% of shops have no website linked at all. Shops with a site hold a median of 85 reviews against 20 for shops without one. Having a site puts you ahead. Having one that does not let people call gives some of that back.
How to check yours in two minutes
Do this on your own phone, not a computer.
- Open your website in your phone's browser.
- Tap the phone number at the top of the homepage. Does your phone offer to call?
- Scroll to the bottom and tap the number in the footer. Same test.
- Open your most popular service page, such as brakes or oil change, and look for a phone number there. Tap it.
- Ask someone with a different phone to do the same. An Android and an iPhone can behave differently.
If any of those fail, you have the problem.
The fix
Make every number a call link. In the website code, a tappable phone number looks like this: <a href="tel:+15555550123">(555) 555-0123</a>. Most website builders have a "phone" or "call" link type that does this for you. Ask whoever manages your site to change every phone number on the site to a call link.
Get the number out of any image. Keep the logo as an image. Put the phone number next to it as real text, coded as a call link.
Add a sticky call button on mobile. A bar at the bottom of the screen that says "Call now" and stays visible while the visitor scrolls. This is standard on well-built shop sites. The website essentials guide covers it along with the other must-haves.
Put the number on every service page. Someone who lands on your brake page from a Google ad should see a call button without going back to the homepage.
Keep the same number everywhere. The number on your website should match the one on your Google profile exactly. Mismatched numbers confuse customers and the search engines that compare your listings.
Then make sure someone answers
Fixing the button only helps if the call gets answered. Most shops miss calls when the front counter is busy or the service writer is in a bay. If you do not know how many calls you miss, check your phone system's log for the last 30 days, then run the numbers in the calculator. The missed calls guide explains how a missed-call text-back saves many of them.
One more check while you are in there
While you are testing on your phone, look at load time. If the homepage takes more than a few seconds to show anything, drivers leave before they even see the number. Large, uncompressed photos of the shop are the usual cause, and they are easy to shrink.
Want to see where your shop's Google profile stands against others in your state? Look at the benchmark report.
If you want your site fixed and a missed-call text-back set up, the free 14-day trial covers any one service, no card. Text or call (385) 722-5326.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, auto repair shops and mobile mechanics among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor