What is local presence?

Inbound and outbound versions of this idea are very different animals.

The inbound one is ordinary. A business that serves a town gets a number from that town, and people recognize it as nearby.

The outbound one is the contentious practice: dialing out with a local-looking number that has no connection to where the caller actually is. Regulators and carriers have both pushed back on it.

For a business answering its own phone, none of that applies. You have a local number because you are local.

Say a mobile notary built her business in one county with a local number, then moved 40 miles into the next area code. Her number is on five years of business cards, title company contact lists and review sites. Number portability lets her keep it, so she does.

Existing clients notice nothing. For new ones in her new town, the number now reads as slightly out of area. She adds a second number with the new area code, forwards both to the same phone, and lists the new one on her local profile.

Six months of call logs settle it. The old number still brings 70% of her calls, nearly all repeat business from title companies. Fewer calls come in on the new one, but most are first-time customers from the new town. Dropping either would have cost her something the other couldn't replace.

Less than it used to, for two reasons. Many metro areas now have overlay codes, where a second or third area code covers the same streets as the original. In those places a new business gets whichever code has stock, and locals have learned that an unfamiliar code can still be next door.

People also carry cell numbers across the country for life. Someone who has kept a college-town number for fifteen years doesn't read much into yours.

Where it still counts is in smaller markets with one long-standing code. There an out-of-area number on a contractor's truck gets noticed.

One practical check applies when you call customers back. Carrier filters flag numbers as spam, sometimes because of what a previous owner did with them. From your business line, call your own cell and a friend's phone on each of the other major carriers. If any of them shows a spam warning, your callbacks are going unanswered, and your number provider can start clearing the label.

GreetKeeper answers inbound calls only, so the outbound version of this practice is not something the product does.

Any number you own can forward to the assistant, local or toll-free.

Each number can have its own hours, greeting and calendar under one account, so a line for a second area can name that area when it answers.