How call tracking improves SEO for your business

If call tracking is implemented correctly, it works wonders for your local SEO and wider marketing activities.

When you run online and offline campaigns, call tracking allows you to see your phone call conversions right alongside your online conversions. This gives you a much more accurate picture of where your leads and sales are coming from.

But it doesn’t stop there.

You can even drill down and see whether online and offline conversions originate from people who’ve made organic searches or via Google Business Profile.

And when taking a closer look at organic search, Mediahawk lets you pinpoint exactly which search engines people use – for example Google, Bing, or niche engines like Ecosia. This gives you a far deeper insight into your prospect and customer demographic, showing how they prefer to search for information.

Setting up call tracking to benefit local SEO

It’s important to configure call tracking correctly to avoid any issues with search engine crawlers – for example, confusing them about your business’s locality.

To get the most from your call tracking software, follow our basic principles and tips.

First, what type of problems can arise?

The problems occur when search engine crawlers look at your online profiles and see multiple, different numbers. These were likely put in place to attribute telephone conversions to each channel.

This confuses the search engines because the information is not consistent. As we know, search engines strive to deliver the best possible results to the user, and judge consistent information as more likely to be correct; it therefore favours these results over yours in the SERPs.

However, you can still track calls generated by these channels with some simple steps.

Use dynamic number insertion on your website

You can use dynamic number insertion (DNI) to control what number is displayed to a website visitor based on a countless range of conditions. This means the numbers for your social networks can display to those referred from social media rather than applying social media dedicated call tracking numbers to your updates. Only your ‘regular’ number is displayed to a search engine crawler, this way it is less likely to get confused.

Read how to set up dynamic code on your website.

Static numbers on your Google Business Profile

You can still use a unique static number on your Google Business Profile to track calls from people who don’t click through to your website. In the contact information of your Google Business Profile you can add multiple phone numbers. This means you can add a unique static number as your primary phone number and, as long as you also add your business number as an additional phone number, this will keep the Google name address phone number (NAP) signals consistent.

See the benefits to local SEO

Once SEO friendly call tracking is in place and your rankings are uncompromised, it’s much easier to see the benefits of call tracking to local SEO.

As well as the benefits mentioned earlier in this post, you’ll also be able to:

• Improve your understanding of the keywords your offline customers are searching for.
  This insight is great for optimising your content for keyword driven searches and making your messaging more effective by answering the questions these customers may have.
• Justify your marketing spend by comparing the quality of organic traffic to the quality of traffic from your local PPC campaigns. Call tracking is the only software out there that can provide a full-lead generating picture.
• Include telephone conversions in your conversion rate testing (CRO) to discover when and where visitors on your site are more likely to call or fill in a form.
• Use conversion data from mobile devices to understand how well your site is optimised for mobile.
• Integrate your call tracking data with Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 so you can view all your conversion data in one place.
• View visitor reports and see what content your web visitors are looking at and what tends to prompt phone calls.
• Identify content gaps by listening into phone calls and know exactly what prospects ask when they call you
• Integrate with your A/B testing tools and establish with far greater accuracy which activities convert best.