Call tracking numbers in local search makes search marketing simpler, more efficient and more cost-effective for both established and new businesses. One of the most significant benefits of using call tracking is that you are never in the dark when it comes to determining the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Call tracking gives you some deep insight into the conversion funnel to establish the efforts that are paying off and the ones that are not. While the local call tracking has a lot to offer, some businesses owners and local marketers are reluctant to adopt this technology due to some anticipated challenges.
Challenges with Call Tracking Numbers In Local Search
You might have come across the horror stories told by companies that have tried to implement local search call tracking. Some lost access to their business number when they tried to change vendors. Others have had their site ranking tanked after the switch.
A few years ago, businesses avoided the use of a call tracking for the local search because they faced the challenge of maintaining citation consistency. The risk of having a messy citation profile and creating bad data was not worth the tracking efforts. As such, call tracking for the local search was avoided for quite some time.
Just like any other kind of integration, call tracking can be implemented poorly or well. The horror stories you have heard mainly arise from inadequate or wrong implementations. These are primarily implemented by vendors who lack skills and/or experience. Some of these vendors even claim to own the local numbers they issue to their clients.
This means that in case a customer needs to switch providers or cancel the service, they will have to lose the call tracking number. This is after they have aggressively marketed the number via multiple channels and having it distributed all over the Internet. Thus, businesses are often forced to stick with a service provider they are not satisfied with This is because the effort and time taken to clean up NAP (Name Address Phone number) data and completely change vendors is too much of a headache. As such, avoid vendors that claim to offer their own call tracking numbers.
The updated local call tracking methods
Businesses have more than NAP consistency to worry about when using local search call tracking. Sometimes change forces marketers to use more than one phone number on their online campaigns. As such, they fear that the customers might not know the rig
ht number to call. This makes their web presence seem messy which can be a turn off for potential customers. Moreover, at Complete Business Group, we understand how challenging it is to create new citations, to clean up the bad ones and to optimise the existing ones.
There is some hope though for local search marketers. You can now track calls from the local search traffic without having to worry about affecting your NAP consistency or losing your existing phone number. The smartest and the safest method we use to achieve this is by adding call tracking to your business without changing your business phone number. This way, we seamlessly overcome the most significant challenge, i.e. to maintain the NAP consistency.
Benefits of call tracking numbers in local search
Just like any other type of tracking, local search call tracking brings numerous benefits to your business when implemented correctly. Such benefits include:
- Tracking phone calls helps the company not only to understand their prospects but also build relationships, answer their questions and ultimately convert them to sales.
- It can segment the calls by medium enabling the business owner to understand the marketing channels that work and the ones that don’t.
- When coupled with dynamic number insertion, businesses can display local numbers to the clients based on the location the prospect is searching from. This is desirable because customers are more likely to trust local businesses to deliver than the national and international ones hence increased conversions.
- Helps you establish which keywords are generating leads, therefore enabling you to implement a more targeted campaign.
- Allows businesses to establish the ROI on their online and offline campaigns.
- Enables enterprises to analyse and core the calls for quality assurance.
- The data analytics allows the company to optimise for the time of the day. This can be a period where the majority of calls come through. Thus they can have more call representatives available during the period to get the job done effectively.
How We Do It at Complete Business Group
Here is a case study of how we implemented a local search call tracking solution for one of our clients. We have this client who runs a consultancy firm. They run an ad campaign that ranks high in the local search.
The inquiries in terms of calls made by prospects after viewing the advert were going to one of the partner’s desk. However, the management wanted the phone calls that the business received from this advert among other inquiries to go to the front office. Though the receptionists were happy to receive these calls, they needed a superior way to manage them.
All we did was to edit the Google My Business listing. We edited the phone number by replacing the primary phone number with the office line which had a call tracking number. Moreover, we added the reception phone number as an additional phone’ From these changes; the calls no longer went directly to the partner’s office. They were now being handled by the front office which was the desired place, yet the rankings were never affected. We also went a step further and changed the practices business name from the practitioner’s name to the business name.
Given there are numerous ways to track local search calls, what will set your business apart is how you analyse and utilise the call data. Tracking calls from local SEO efforts will include data from your current customers. However, businesses need to focus more on the first-time callers which are the golden metric. After all, the core goal of using call tracking numbers in local search is to generate new inbound leads that will bring more business.