June 24, 2022

Call Tracking & SEO: Why Are Both Considered The Perfect Combination?

VoIP and SIP are changing the way businesses communicate nowadays. But what exactly do they mean, and how are they different? Get an in-depth analysis of these two confusing terms in this article.

Mike Khorev

SEO Expert

Reading time: 5 minutes

Most businesses rely on driving traffic to their website to generate leads. That’s why many marketers focus on search engine optimization (SEO) to boost their rankings in search engines.

Well, we hate to burst your bubble but SEO simply isn’t enough. You need a deeper understanding of how and why your customers are visiting your website, and this is where call tracking comes in.

Call tracking is equally important in measuring the effectiveness of offline billboards, ads in newspapers, and online, including PPC and SEO efforts for software companies.

That said, let’s take a deeper look into how call tracking and SEO complement each other and help generate even more leads from your website traffic.

What is call tracking?

Call tracking is a feature that analyzes which digital and offline marketing campaigns are the source of calls coming in.

In other words, it is the process of determining how callers found your business. This allows you to track campaigns that drive call traffic for your business. Your teams can use this data to measure the success of existing campaigns and optimize the best-performing ones.

Here’s an example.

A visitor sees your ad on Facebook and decides to call you by clicking on the ad. When the call gets through, you’ll know that they called through this specific ad campaign. Throughout the week, you receive several calls and realize that they all come from Facebook. This gives you insight into the performance of the Facebook ad that you wouldn’t have identified if you did not track your calls.

Why call tracking is important

Your website is the ‘face’ of your business. If you don’t have a physical store, your website represents your storefront. The entrance to your business. It’s where you showcase who you are, what you offer, and why you’re better than your competitors.

And like most (if not all) websites, you’d want your website visitors to take some sort of action like submitting a contact form, getting in touch via live chat — but what most businesses should hope for should be web visitors giving you a call. After all, phone calls turn into customers 10x to 12x more often than web leads do.

Now, if you’re getting inbound calls (congratulations!), you need a way to track them.

As we mentioned, call tracking gives you more insight into where your best leads are coming from and understand what your customers are searching for to find your business.tr

So does call tracking hurt SEO?

In the past, call tracking was said to hurt SEO because of Google’s requirement of businesses having their name, address, and phone number across all listings. A business’ information had to remain consistent, so having multiple unique tracking numbers on different listings was a sure-fire way to get pushed down the ranks.

Fortunately, that’s not the case now.

Remember how call tracking pulls relevant data such as where your customers are coming from and what they’re searching for?

Well, this gives you a bigger picture of your customers’ needs, pain points, and behavior.

When you know the paid keyword they clicked on or which pages on your website they’ve viewed before they call you, it gives you powerful insights into what’s working, what isn’t, and how you can serve each customer.

Are these people coming from Google or some other search engine? Did they call from Google My Business? What page did they land on before calling?

A huge portion of attributing calls to online campaigns involves dynamic number insertion (DNI). It is a feature that automatically assigns a unique phone number to each campaign and displays that number to visitors who arrive at your website via a specific campaign.

For instance, if a visitor finds your company via Google organic search, a specific phone will be shown to them throughout the entire time on your website. When they decide to call using that number, you’ll know that they came through a Google organic search.

Understanding all these will help you better optimize your website by including specific keywords. You’ll know where to focus your efforts to drive maximum results.

Call tracking and SEO: Why they are the perfect combination

1. It’s a content map

As we mentioned earlier, DNI automatically assigns a unique phone number to each campaign. This allows you to better track which campaign drove the call.

When the call comes in, you have the option to record your conversation (most call tracking providers off a call recording feature) so that you get a more detailed analysis of your calls by identifying what was said during the call and common keywords used.

By doing deeper analysis on your calls, you can then decide to push out content that will be beneficial for your customers. Do they need more how-to guides? Or should you set up a dedicated FAQs page to clarify doubts?

2. Helps with landing page optimization

48% of marketers build a new landing page for every marketing campaign. But of course, not every landing page is going to give you the results you want.

But that’s not the case if you have call tracking!

Equipped with better knowledge of what your customers are searching for, you’d be able to better focus your marketing efforts for future landing pages to drive conversions.

With call tracking, you will also be able to determine which landing pages are generating calls to your business. You can also use the keyword variations for other local SEO pages to see if they succeed.

3. Helps optimize your highest converting pages

The main goal for your marketing through running an SEO ad campaign is to get more leads to your business. When a person uses your website to phone your business, they are making a conversion.

If you notice most calls coming from one page, let’s say your product page, this would give you a good indication that it’s your highest converting page.

When you know what pages drive phone calls and leads, you’ll know where to put more effort into the growth of your business.

4. Gives an idea of your customer and their behavior

DNI means every customer sees a unique temporary number after they log in to your website. Using the DNI, you’ll be able to learn the following:

The keyword that the customer searched before landing on your website
The source of conversion
A user’s activity on the website
The rep who picked up the phone
The length of the call

This information helps in gathering more information about the customer and their behavior.

5. Call tracking is a great conversion indicator

I suppose your main goal of SEO is not just to drive traffic to your website but to get more leads and increase your sales on the website.

Call tracking helps in identifying if your traffic is converting or not. It tracks conversions and lands them back on your website, allowing you to identify what works best and can be improved.

With call tracking, you get to listen to different customers’ queries and look for opportunities that you can think of that your ideal customer is searching for and meet them at a personal and unique level.

The bottom line

Call tracking and SEO can drive more traffic to your website and generate more leads for your business.

Your marketing campaigns are going to be much more effective if you have some understanding of your customer’s needs and behaviors.

We hope that this article has given you some insight into why call tracking and SEO can complement your business when used together.

If you’re still wondering if call tracking is right for you, you may want to find out more about how call tracking has benefited businesses in different industries.

If you would like to find out more about how Novocall’s call tracking feature can help your business, get started with us today!

Mike Khorev

Mike Khorev is a lead SEO expert at Nine Peaks Media. Mike offers expert advice on optimizing your company website the right way through performance-based on and off-site SEO and many other online practices.

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