Call Tracking: Bad for Business

At Be Locally SEO, we are seeing more and more new clients come to us that have contracting with marketing companies to install a tracking phone number or several phone numbers in their previous advertising efforts. Some marketing companies are even creating alternate websites to market the tracking numbers. A tracking phone number is one that takes customers directly to the business but also tracks where customers are finding the business online. Tracking numbers provide the business owner with quantitative information about how effective their advertising dollars are online such as, "Am I attracting more customers from Yellow Pages or Super Pages." While metrics are important in helping you determine how to spend advertising dollars, multiple phone numbers can have very adverse effects on how your business is ranked by Google and other search engines, actually decreasing your bottom line. Let me tell you why.

In order for your business to rank highly in search results, search engines depend on a number of factors that speak to your business legitimacy, popularity, relevance, and credibility. This is particularly true for local businesses. Since many businesses do not have websites yet are highly successful, Google and other search engines rely a great deal on what is called citations so that businesses with a website are not penalized in comparison to businesses that have websites. Citations are places online where the business name and address or name and phone number or name, address and phone number are found. This information has been termed the business NAP (for Name, Address, and Phone), an acronym inspired by Localeze.

By the way, if you don't have a business website yet, we can't encourage you strongly enough to get one (but that's another lens)!

Every business has a unique NAP, like every person has a unique fingerprint or social security number. The NAP is how a business is identified and consistency in the NAP becomes a trust factor that search engines look for. When a tracking number is introduced and linked to a business, the NAP for that business is confusing for search bots and some citations may be overlooked because they appear to be unreliable or untrustworthy. Disregarding NAPS is exactly the opposite impact SEO companies like Be Locally SEO want to see. Moreover, businesses change locations but they generally retain the same phone number these days so the phone number is one of the most important factors in the NAP.

Let's say the search bots do acknowledge the new NAP. One possibility is that your relevance and credibility is then split between two or more "citations" thereby diluting the impact of the citation, again an outcome that is contrary to building your position in online searches. And things are likely to get much worse from there, especially if you have a phony website as well. It is not unusual for a NAP with a tracking phone to become what is known as "viral" on the web. Viral, in this case, means the tracking number is picked up by a directory that is crawled by a company such as Acxiom. Acxiom leases out their data to many online partners and suddenly the tracking number is associated with the business at or near the rates as their actual phone number. The extent to which Google, Yahoo and Bing are able to figure out that conflicting information refers to the same business is a gamble we at Be Locally SEO recommend you to avoid.

Besides, there is enough junk on the internet. SEO best practices dictate that marketing companies should avoid adding more clutter such as tracking phone numbers and tracking websites. Successful business know how important it is to stay focused on trustworthy qualities so keep it real, keep it genuine.

This article was inspired by first hand experience cleaning up tracking phone numbers at Be Locally SEO, Local SEO blogs, a column by David Mihm, and a Small Business Online Coach article.