This guide shows you how to find all of the unique telephone links (e.g., <a href=”tel:(555) 555-5555″>) on your website. I’ve found this most useful when migrating from an old site to a new one, sometimes old call tracking phone numbers will get copy-pasted into the new website’s content.
Before you begin
This guide assumes you have the paid version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider. If you don’t have it, you can get it over at screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Add new custom extraction
- Click Configuration in the top menu bar.
- Open the Custom menu.
- Click Custom Extraction.
This is where you will be adding a new Custom Extraction.
There are multiple ways we can slice this data, the first, which I’ll be showing, is to look inside of all of link hrefs on the page. This way you can see what the anchor is actually linking to, not just the text. There is another configuration you can go with to see all of the html for the link which you can get by omitting href in the last field of the extraction.
- Clicking the + Add button in the bottom right of the window.
- In the first box you can enter a name for the extractor, by default it’s called Extractor 1, but we’ll update the name to Phone link so it’s easier to read in the report.
- For the select box we’ll select CSSPath.
- In the Enter CSSPath input enter a[href^=”tel:”]
a[href^="tel:"]- For the next field select Extract HTML Element.
- In the attribute field enter href
- Click OK.
Enter URL and Start crawl
Enter your website URL in the main box where it says Enter URL to spider and click Start.
Once the crawl has finished click on the Custom Extraction tab located in series of tabs in the middle of the screen. Depending on the size of your screen, you might not see the Custom Extraction tab. If you are unable to find it, then click on the dropdown arrow to right right of that series of tabs and you should be able to find the Custom Extraction option there.
After selecting Custom Extraction you can scroll right and see all of phone numbers, it will keep adding more columns the more links it finds on the page, so you may want to resize the columns to get a better view.
Here we can see all of the links on the website that start with tel: and what page they’re on. This will allow you to make sure that all phone numbers on the website are correct.
If you have a ton of pages, then it might be useful to copy this data into a spreadsheet and apply conditional formatting to the cells so it’s easy to visually see incorrect numbers.