Stop putting your phone number in an image

I audit a lot of local business sites. Here is a fault I find on maybe one in five, and it costs money every single day.

The phone number is part of an image.

Sometimes it is baked into the header graphic. Sometimes it is inside the logo file. Sometimes there is a nice banner across the top of the homepage with the number set in a font the designer liked, exported as a PNG.

Here is what that means in practice.

Nobody on a phone can tap it. They have to memorize it, leave your site, open the dialer, and type it in. Some percentage of people do that. The rest do not, because your competitor's number was tappable.

Search engines cannot read it. Your phone number is one of the strongest local signals you have, and you have hidden it in a picture.

Screen readers cannot read it. A blind customer cannot call you.

Nobody can copy and paste it to a spouse.

The fix takes four minutes. Put the number in text. Wrap it in a tel: link. Style the text to look however you want, because text can be styled.

I have watched a business go from a handful of calls a week to a steady stream by doing nothing else. Not a redesign. Not new copy. Not an SEO campaign. Just making the number tappable, because it turned out people had been wanting to call the whole time and the website was in the way.