If you’re in search engine marketing, you probably want to have as many high-quality SEM tools at your disposal as possible to ensure your marketing campaigns will be successful. One SEM tool that’s sometimes overlooked is call tracking.If you’ve been an SEO long enough, you know there is a good reason why call tracking was deliberately overlooked in years past. And that reason is Google’s NAP requirements. Google’s NAP requirements dictate that a company’s name, address and phone number be identical across websites. If this information conflicts between online directories, Google will penalize the related website and it will appear lower in search engine results pages.Call tracking involves using different phone numbers in different marketing channels. Naturally, this confused Google, which punished the websites engaged in call tracking with lower local SEO and page rankings.With today’s technology, companies no longer have to worry about Google’s algorithms leading to lower rankings for their websites when they engage in call tracking. That’s because call tracking services now have dynamic number insertion. With dynamic number insertion, your visitors see a different temporarily inserted phone number when they visit your website thanks to a clever website script.Now that the issue with Google’s NAP requirements has been resolved, call tracking has evolved as a legitimate, influential marketing tool that can enhance your search engine optimization. Call tracking can benefit any business that relies, at least in part, on inbound calls for sales. Here are some examples of businesses that may benefit from call tracking:
- Dental Clinics
- Car Dealerships
- Call Centers
- Real Estate Agencies
- E-commerce Outlets
- Hotels
- Airlines
- Home Services Providers
Those are just a few examples of organizations that stand to benefit from call tracking. It’s important to understand that if you rely on phone calls for at least a portion of your sales, call tracking has the potential to greatly enhance your SEO.
About Call Tracking
It’s necessary for you to understand some call tracking basics in order for you to fully appreciate how it can enhance your SEO. As we mentioned earlier, call tracking assigns different phone numbers to different marketing channels. This happens so you can track the sources of your inbound calls and resulting conversations.Every search engine marketing channel has its own unique phone number, including your PPC ads, social media advertisements and your offline promotions, such as billboards, radio spots, and television commercials. This makes call tracking a vital part of a multi-channel, comprehensive marketing plan.Without call tracking, it’s nearly impossible to determine which marketing channels are motivating people to call your business. Since you can’t attribute your calls to singular sources, it’s impossible to tell which marketing channels are producing results and which ones are underperforming. This makes it a guessing game when it comes to figuring out how you should spend your marketing dollars.With call tracking, you can:
- Attribute calls to specific marketing channels
- Calculate the ROI of your marketing campaigns accurately
- Optimize your budget so more resources are reserved for the marketing channels that generate the largest numbers of inbound calls and have the highest ROI
How Do Call Tracking and SEO Work Together?
You can probably already imagine how call tracking and SEO work together, but it’s still worth discussing in some detail. Call tracking can do more than “just” identify the marketing channel that yielded an individual call. It can also collect valuable information you can use to improve your SEM.Here is some of the valuable information call tracking can provide:
- Keywords that lead people to your website
- Sources of conversions
- Users’ activities when they visit your website
- Callers’ phone numbers
- Identities of the agents who answer individual calls
- Callers’ locations
- Devices people use as well as the screen resolution of their devices
- Length of calls
- Recorded conversations
Depending on the call tracking system you use, you may be able to mine the conversations your system records. This can help you identify the actual words people use when they discuss your brand and the things you sell. This, along with all the other information mentioned above, can help you improve your SEO strategy immensely.
Even More Reasons to Use Call Tracking
As if getting valuable information about the people who call your business isn’t enough of a reason for you to use call tracking, there are even more reasons you should consider call tracking. Here are a few of them:
- Facilitates Landing Page Optimization: A call tracking system can identify the path someone followed to reach a landing page, beginning with the keyword that initially inspired the individual to take action. Armed with this information, you can determine the exact keywords that are most effective on your landing page and those that lead to conversions.
- Enables Optimization of Your Best Performing Pages: You earn a lead whenever someone calls your organization as a result of your website. A call tracking system will keep tabs on your website’s pages so you can tell where your leads are originating from. This enables you to identify the pages that perform the best in the context of leads and prepares you to optimize them so they perform even better.
- Acts as a Conversion Indicator: As an SEO, you don’t want to attract just any traffic. You want to attract traffic that will convert and buy something from your business. Call tracking can act as an indicator of whether or not the traffic you’re attracting is actually converting. That’s because a call tracking system can track your conversions and identify the sources they originated from.
Set Up Call Tracking Today
Around here, we use an agency plan with CallRail for our search engine optimization clients. The plans are affordable, and you can head over to their site to get your account set up.Call tracking is just one of the mechanisms we use to track the success of a search engine optimization campaign. Be sure to set up Google Analytics tracking and Google Search Console so you can really understand where your traffic is coming from!
