To prove how effective your company’s search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are can be daunting. If yours is a business for which your customer base does not usually fill out a contact form on a website, determining which customers arrived at your establishment because of your website’s increased visibility to search engines can be difficult indeed. For example, if you have a fast-food restaurant, an emergency veterinary service, or a café, customers generally do not fill out online forms and wait for you to respond. They simply get your number or address from your website and either call or just drop in.
Mobile web traffic is even more difficult to track. Statistics show that approximately 70 percent of people who search for a particular type of business will call in right from the search listing itself, just touching the phone number on the screen. They need information and service now, so they call the business right from their smartphone. But to the business itself, they have a difficult time finding how that customer found their phone number, so it is difficult to plan their Web strategy through that sort of traffic.
Your business could, of course, use tracking numbers. Yet those numbers can come back to bite you. Regular customers who reach a temporary tracking number when they call will get frustrated when the tracking number stops working. In the time that it takes them to find the correct phone number, they can probably locate several of your competitors-and often end up there instead of at your place. Small companies with a regular customer base, therefore, usually do not find tracking numbers to be a good solution for their quest to optimize their presence on Internet searches.
Search engine giant Google, however, has proposed a solution to this problem. With its new Website Call Conversions feature, Google has made it easier for businesses to test the effectiveness of tracking calls that come from their website.
All a site owner needs to do is to update the code on the company’s website. This update will provide the site with a dynamic or fixed phone number, which can be tracked using the site’s traffic reports.
This feature will generate a Google forwarding number on your site after site visitors click through. That number will remain active for as long as 90 days. Furthermore, your AdWords ads each can have a separate phone number, which allows you to see at a glance which of those ads are most effective. You can also use this feature on other parts of your website. This will allow you to see which portions of the website are most popular for your site’s visitors.
The forwarding number provides some key information about the caller. Though it is not yet sophisticated enough to provide some details about the caller, such as their interests and other demographics, the Google number does provide information about the area from which the customer places the call, as well as the length of the call. Your company can use this data to determine the effect your online presence has on those customers who call you on the phone-definitely a step in the right direction to help you create a stronger presence on the mobile Web.
