call tracking

How Does Call Tracking Impact SEO?

Call tracking’s reputation as both an advertiser’s go-to metric and an agency’s secret weapon continues to spread like wildfire, but so do concerns about how its implementation might hurt a site’s SEO.

Thankfully, these concerns are overblown. When call tracking is used properly, it won’t impact SEO negatively at all. However, engaging in misuse or abuse of call tracking can hurt your rankings.

It’s worth saying again: call tracking will never damage your SEO on its own, provided you utilize your call tracking tools correctly and effectively.

So how do you do that? One tool to learn is Dynamic Number Insertion, or DNI. It provides an exclusive call tracking phone number for each source of marketing or advertising that may be driving lead traffic to your site. Using Javascript, you can track exactly which effort generated a new lead for you, all while your site’s normal number remains hardcoded in your web property.

How DNI Helps Your Campaign

Your latest Pay-Per-Click lead would see a different number when accessing the site than your next organic search visitor would, allowing you to easily determine what marketing or advertising strategies are the most effective.

The DNI process is similar to that of dynamic content features and automated marketing tools, both used to generate dynamic content, like “client-side” pages generated for quick profiles of web visitors, based on their information.

And DNI does it all without undermining your SEO efforts.

But that doesn’t mean that call tracking tools are immune to improper use or mistakes in implementation, and SEO can suffer do to abuse of call tracking tools.

So How Can Call Tracking Can Undermine SEO?

While not strictly illegal, abuse of Google’s call tracking policy can definitely be SEO-detrimental.

For example, if you opt to use call tracking to analyze your online directory, you’ll be at odds with Google’s absolute consistency policy regarding NAP—that is, name, address, phone number.

Posting different numbers across listings in the same area can confound NAP, and this is probably a big part of why Google demands that your contact information remains consistent across all of your web properties, which makes things much easier on NAP.

As long as you’re following the rules, you won’t have a problem. Stick to recommended uses for tools like DNI, and if you think you might just be bending Google’s rules, do a risk-reward analysis. Does the information you gather from the call tracking outweigh the potential long-term damage to your site’s SEO?

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