How does dynamic call tracking affect local SEO?

[FluidAdvertising]

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.

[WilliamKammer]

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.

[dsinger]

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.

[FluidAdvertising]

This is perfect. I really appreciate you answering so fully.

[WilliamKammer]

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.