Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How does dynamic call tracking affect local SEO?
-
I would like to begin tracking calls and offline conversions, but I am concerned that if I add a dynamic call tracking software that it will negatively affect SEO.
-
Hi DJReason,
If you can manage to not have a pool of numbers for SEO traffic, my solution above will work. By using a script that only fires when certain parameters hit, it allows you to only use one number for non-parametered URLs, so search engine bots will only see the one number. Then you use that number during citation building, and you're golden... at least from that perspective.
-
At my company, we currently employ call tracking software to help dissect incoming calls to our call center phone numbers. We have 5 national brands with desktop and mobile versions of each brand's website, as well as 900+ location specific websites, again for mobile and desktop for our individual brick and mortar stores. This means we have over 80 dynamically swapped phone numbers showing on our sites depending on the origin of the visitor and if our software solution understands them correctly. We use Mongoose Metrics, but may be shopping for another solution, or building our own.
We divide traffic by PPC, Organic, Referral, Direct and Other. PPC and controlled referral traffic is relatively easy. By adding parameters to those destination URLs, it helps the software detect where those visitors are coming from and swaps the number appropriately. For organic, there are also ways to detect by process of elimination. For example, if a visitor comes from Google, but is not PPC (lacks PPC parameter), then we assume it is Organic. We do the same for Bing and Yahoo, since those are the three search engines where we advertise using PPC. Where it becomes challenging is the small percentage of organic traffic that does not use the top 3 search engines (ie. AOL, ASK, Baidu, etc). Because we simply cannot create code for any and all search engines out there, that traffic gets dumped into our referral bucket. The good news is that it is generally so small, that any information gleaned from those tier 2 and 3 search engines would be directional at best and would not influence our optimization efforts.
Our software also heavily relies on 1st party cookie information to help determine if a visitor is a bot, from a referral source, direct, etc and swaps the number based on our logic. There are also those visitors that have disabled javascript, or where our software does not fire correctly, or is not defined minutely enough so the wrong number or default number shows instead of the intended swapped number. These typically get lumped into our Other category, when all else fails.
As far as your question is concerned, there may be a downshift in your local SEO when various data aggregators come to your site, and potentially grab the wrong phone number based on a conditional swap. We rely heavily on schema markup and rich snippets to help direct the bots to ignore the software controlled number and to only read the hard coded number, but it is not perfect.
If you come across any software solutions that help minimize data loss and discrepancies, I would love to know.
-
This is perfect. I really appreciate you answering so fully.
-
It can. Ideally, the same phone number will always be displayed, but in your case (and a few of my clients), dynamic call tracking really needs to be on the site.
There are solutions to this. I don't know which software you're using, and it could differ depending on the software. The solution we found that worked was to put the call tracking script in, and have it change the phone number on the website only when traffic is coming in with certain parameters.
This works well with PPC call tracking, because the traffic coming in has predictable parameters, and those can used as a trigger to fire the script. Search engines aren't going to use these parameters, so they won't effect local SEO. Depending on how much direct and referral traffic you have, you might be able to use this solution with your PPC pool of numbers, and then you can focus on separating the referral and direct traffic from the SEO traffic to get the data you need. We usually only split the PPC traffic this way, trying to do it with organic could get you into trouble.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What do I need to do for SEO when moving a business out of state?
Hello! So I have a business that I run out of a single location for the last 3 years. I am unfortunately having to move here in the next few weeks My question is what do I need to do in order to have the best chance at SEO for the new location? When should I make the changes? Does it take a long time for me to stop showing up in the previous location? and is there something I need to do to remove those? Also, is there an app or a website where I can find and update all listings at once or at least a bulk of them? I know that there are some weird sites that have my business info in them that I did not put there. Obviously these would have the wrong address. Some do not have a contact info or a way for me to log into them. What would I do with these sites? Thank you!
Local Listings | | Rmarkjr810 -
Local Landing Page Optimization and Multiple GMB Listings
Hello, We’re building out a site for our business that has close to 100 office locations in different cities. Many of these are ‘partner brands’ that we have acquired under our brand. Similar to a franchise model. We want to be able to help users find offices near their location. Each office will have it’s own landing page with a physical address and contact information. We know we’ll have to build out unique copy and markup customized to the office/location. We’ve already read through https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages as well. We’re also considering ‘silos’ to build out pages for each location. To preserve authority and avoid cannibalization; our thought was having each location as sub-folders off of our domain (i.e. domain.com/locations/Partner#1/). The other option would be using a sub-domain (i.e. Partner.Domain.com/) which we noticed competitors doing and treating each sub-domain as their own independent site. Is all of the above the correct strategy? Any further suggestions? Should we fill out a separate GMB for each office and should they all use the same brand name? (in other words “BrandA” vs. “BrandA” - Brooklyn Office). In addition to GMB; would each location need local listings created (also all under the same name)? Any help or insight would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Thank you in advance. Best,
Local Listings | | Ben-R0 -
Tracking Phone Numbers in Google My Business Listings and Beyond
Hey all, Wanted to run something by you. I am getting pressed to use tracking phone numbers for all of our GMB pages for over 100 locations across the country. Has anyone done this for their own listings or for their clients? Because I will have to do it for GMB, this means I will be sending these same phone numbers out to the other major directories and data sources around the web. The phone numbers do contain the local area code for each city and do directly connect our customers to their specific location without any kind of redirecting. How is Google looking at this? I have read before it is a no-no but have also read it is not a big deal. Any thoughts would be much appreciated! -Ben
Local Listings | | Davey_Tree0 -
Facebook Locations - Good or Bad for Local Rankings?
Our company has multiple (3) offices, including our headquarters, and each has its own Facebook page. Other than the primary company page, the other two locations have only been claimed and do not have posts, reviews, check-ins, etc. Now, Facebook recently granted us access to Facebook Locations, which, if I understand correctly, would remove 2-out-of-3 office pages and add a "Locations" tab to our primary company page where people can see the other offices. _See Starbucks Example: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Starbucks/locations/?ref=page_internal _ I've read mixed reviews regarding using the Locations feature, but nothing definitively answers whether or not this would negatively affect local rankings. Does anyone have firsthand experience going from individual business pages to a single parent business page with Locations? Is there any trustworthy documentation out there about this?
Local Listings | | MPlata1 -
Do You Know What's Triggering Your Local Packs?
Hey To All My Local Pals, Here 🙂 Recently, I watched a totally fascinating LocalU video in which Mike Blumenthal introduced a hypothesis that there may be a way to analyze what, specifically, is triggering a specific local pack. Now, Mike is stating that correlation is not causation in explaining this, but basically what he starts talking about at around 4:40 in the video is that what you are seeing rank well in the local packs may be demonstrably caused by what you see ranking organically beneath the pack, or may be caused by totally different signals. Mike says, _"If you're seeing the top 10 results are all IYP industry sites, and there's a pack showing, and the highest local site is 24 or something in organic, it's unlikely that that's what's triggering the pack. And so then you want to look at third-party triggers and see if that's what's actually triggering the pack." _ Obviously, all of us who do Local are familiar with the idea that a tremendous variety of elements contribute to pack rankings, but I am particularly intrigued by the idea of looking at the organic result beneath a pack and determining that there is little or no correlation between them, and this then driving one to look elsewhere for contributing factors. In a recent response to another thread here on Q&A, I discussed some common local pack ranking failure causes when organic rank is high. What I'd love to see is whether, if you look at some of your clients' desired packs, can you tell if organic signals are driving them, or can you see that it's not organic signals driving the pack, as Mike suggests. What, in those cases, does appear to be driving the packs? I'd be so interested in a discussion on this. What do you see? What do you think of Mike's suggestions?
Local Listings | | MiriamEllis9 -
Local SEO business name issue due to aggregator
So I work for a college and we have multiple locations. My tactic has been always to keep the name the same for all of them (no city name), and then change the address and phone number for each. But there is 1000s of college listings websites out there that aggregate college and school data from the same source: the US government. Now the way that they have most, if not all, multi-location colleges listed is: "college name-city name". I can see the value in that, but I guess I'm just wondering what to do since it obviously can't be changed. Should I revert all of our listings as "college name-city name" to match the 1000s of listings that have it that way? I've been under the impression that I should leave the city/town name out of the name, but I'm just wondering what you think best practices would be? Thanks
Local Listings | | TomBinga1125
Tom0 -
Concerned about cannibalization for local SEO results. Should we move some of our location pages to a subdomain?
Currently we are providing local SEO recommendations for a well known pharmacy chain. Like most major brands they enjoy multiple organic (not just 3 pack results) listings when people search for local phrases such as "Dallas pharmacy clinics'". The issue is that all these listings are coming from the same domain page. We are seeing multiple listings both branded and non-branded search queries. Our concern is that Google will someday decide to choose one listing as the most authoritative and nix the rest of the local listings which will reduce their first page search engine saturation. To maintain first page saturation we are considering recommending to the client that they move some of their location listings
Local Listings | | RosemaryB
to a subdomain (different IP address) to avoid a Google "clean up". Please note that our client is certainly not using any "doorway" pages but some of these are very scarce on content. They do not have an issue with duplicate content either. By using subdomains could we help maintain our client's first page saturation? Any links to articles would be much appreciated.0 -
How to get a verification tick next to the URL in a Google Plus Local page?
Google Plus Local: https://plus.google.com/+PrestedHallFeering Website: www.prested.co.uk So how do I get the verification tick next to the URL on this businesses Google page? Also, even though the website is much strong then those in the map listings for Wedding Venues In Essex, whats preventing this website from appearing in there? My local optimisation knowledge is poor!
Local Listings | | jasondexter0