Gain Full Accountability With Call Tracking

More Accountability

We’ve talked in the past about tracking conversions on your website, but that doesn’t really cover tracking a customer who calls you from a phone. This is super important; it’s very possible that a majority of your customers will call instead of filling out a form. That’s a huge area of missing accountability. 

But if you have call tracking in place, then you have the full meal deal for accountability. You have:

  • conversion tracking (the online form component)
  • call tracking (the offline phone component)

But how do you track the calls?

How It Works

Using a piece of code on your website, you can swap the phone number displayed on your website with a fake tracking number. The customer then calls that number, which goes directly to your regular phone number.

At this point the customer is none the wiser, but you can now find whether your call came from:

  • Google organic search
  • Google Adwords
  • Facebook
  • Bing
  • …and other sources

This is pretty fancy stuff, and it’s relatively cheap too. If you’re going to set it up yourself, you’ll want to find a provider that gives you toll-free numbers, keyword-level tracking, and call recording.

Call recording?

Record Calls

You automatically get data into how long each call was, and who it came from – this we know.  But you can also activate a feature to record the audio from calls.

We’ve all heard that little call whisper “Your call may be recorded for quality purposes”. What are they doing with all these calls?

 They’re doing exactly what you should be doing – listening in. Most call tracking software will give you the option to record the calls that come in, so you have an actual audio of every person that calls your business from your website.

As a business owner, this helps you in a few ways:

  • you can audit your processes to find out if your receptionist is doing her job well, and is friendly enough. Is her manner turning away customers?
  • you can measure exactly what customers are calling in for and buying. At that point you can see exactly how much money your advertising is making you.

Call recording isn’t for every business though. If you’re a medical practice for example, you might not be allowed to record your customer’s calls due to the confidentiality of your industry. 

For everyone else, there’s call recording.

Summary:

  • with both conversion tracking and call tracking in place, you know exactly what results your website and online ads produce.
  • call tracking is dynamically inserted onto your website based on how the visitor found your website
  • you can record calls for more valuable data.
  • if you don’t want to record calls, then don’t.
  • you can even use call tracking on your offline ads to see if they’re producing results.

Gaining Traffic For Your Website: Quantity, Or Quality?

If you’re working on a content marketing strategy for your website (that is, writing content in order to drive search engine rankings), it can be tempting to push out something less insightful in favor of producing more content.

 It’s a trap; don’t fall for it.

1 insanely high-quality article could drive more traffic than 100 low-medium quality articles.

Think about your own trip to your email inbox. Are you thinking: “I just don’t have enough email to check – anything at all is fine, I just need some reading material!”. I doubt it. You’re likely thinking “I don’t have time for any of this, I’ve more important things to do”.

It’s a rare occasion for you to spend time reading an article that’s come into your inbox – except for the 2-3 newsletters that you’re subscribed to that always have incredible content to share. They’re always fascinating and severely related to you, so you’re willing to take time out of your day to read because they enrich your life.

You want to make it your goal to write content that’s that good.

Google Panda Update

Another reason to really put yourself in the “great content” game is Google’s “Panda” update. This is a special system created by Google to penalize websites that produce low quality content.

So write all you want, if your content is just regurgitating the same old ideas found everywhere else on the internet, you could be straying too close to a ferocious stray dog.

If you’ve been hit by the Panda algorithm, the simplest way to reverse your penalty is to increase the quality of the content on your website. This might be a large job, depending on how much content you have.

The Hallmarks Of Quality Content

Adding in a unique perspective or commentary based on your expertise is the easiest way to make your content more unique and original. While you’re adding that in, make sure your voice and personality really represent the business well; this way visitors get to know you and come to expect your brand of information.

Some key indicators of incredible content include:

  • It has that “been there – done that” voice and flair.

  • It has specific knowledge that comes from real experience.

  • It supports a depth of useful information – you link to sources, such as this link to Make Your Content PreSell, which is where this “incredible content criteria” was originally listed.

  • It is spun or positioned in a way that is uniquely yours.

  • It is consistent from web page to page, newsletter to newsletter, Facebook post to post, tweet to tweet, from week to month to year.

Beyond those criteria, you might also consider creating content with:

  • professional images to help illustrate what you’re teaching

  • a catchy headline to grab a visitor’s attention

  • infographics or videos that make difficult concepts simple

Because you’re the expert in your field, you’re the best person to write this content. You might not have time though, in which case you should hire a writer to interview you and ask you questions related to whichever subject you’re talking about.

If you don’t have time for regular interviews, then you’ll want to find a writer who has knowledge and experience in your area of business.

And lastly, if you can’t find a writer who has experience in your area of business, at least find a writer who’s really good!

Summary:

  • Create content that blows visitors away

  • Producing huge amounts of low-quality content is a sure-fire way to get hit by Google’s Panda algorithm.

  • Hire a writer if you don’t have time to do it yourself

How Does Google Work? (Part 3)

What To Write About

If you were to write a book on your business, what would the chapters be? Heck, you might even consider visiting Amazon.com and looking through the chapters of their books based on your industry – you might find some great ideas right there!

After that, you might consider keeping a notepad handy and writing down questions that your customers ask you. Maybe you can answer those questions on your website in the form of an article?

Regardless of your ideas, it’s very useful to try out a keyword research tool to find out what people are searching for online.

Wordtracker is a useful keyword research tool. Just type in a keyword related to the article you’re considering, and you should be able to find the demand (and competition) for related topics. They have a monthly subscription that you might consider if you’ll be writing a fair amount of content for your website, but if you just need it for a few articles the free limited tool may be useful to you.

If you hire an SEO company to help you with your optimization, they should have keyword research tools available to do that type of research for you.

Regardless of what route you take, remember the golden rule of ranking online:

Information, information, information!

Let’s Remember

To recap on this series:

  • Google is in the business of providing the best information to its visitors. It’s where they make their bread & butter.
  • On the web, it’s “information, information, information” not “location, location, location”.
  • If you want to be found by Google, you need to provide great information that answers customer’s questions.
  • Do keyword research to find out what information in your niche is “in-demand”. Feel free to sprinkle a few of these keywords throughout your articles to help give Google cues to what the content is about.
  • The best person to write content for your website…is you! An optimal solution is to hire a writer who can interview you and get the best information from you directly. If not you, they can interview one of your expert employees.
  • Make a content plan for what you want to write about on your website. Not sure how to do this? Pretend your site is a book – what would the “chapters” be?

Once you start getting a steady flow of content to your website, don’t be surprised when the visitors start to naturally flow in. As long as your site has a professional design to go along with the expert content, you should be converting customers very quickly.

After you’ve got them hooked in, what are you going to do with those customers? In order to keep them engaged with you, you may want to consider starting a mailing list (newsletter) if you don’t have one already. It’s an incredibly effective tool to sell your products and services.

Stay tuned as we cover mailing lists on a future post.

How Does Google Work? (Part 2)

How Does Google Know Who Has The Best Information?

In part 1 we spoke about how Google about information, not location. Instead of location, location, location – now it’s information, information, information.

Now that you’ve written the best valuable content about your niche, how does Google KNOW that it’s the best? After all, they aren’t going to physically read all the billions and billions of pages on the web, are they?

Well, yes and no. No, Google can’t have a real human read all of your web pages, but they can see how real humans (your visitors) react to your content.

For example, when a visitor clicks onto your site:

  • do they stay there long?
  • are they so impressed that they click through to the rest of your site, or do they leave immediately, back to Google?
  • are other websites linking to your site to help educate THEIR visitors?
  • are your social media pages thriving, thus displaying how active the community surrounding your website/business is?

There are over 200+ factors as to why Google might rank your website highly. Many of them revolve around how good your content is. Beyond writing something good, you can also help the search engines know what your site is about through something called SEO (search engine optimization).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of helping your website gain better rankings in Google. Writing content is actually a big part of SEO, but there’s more that can be done to give Google clues about what your content is about, such as:

  • sprinkling in keywords that are relevant to the content
  • getting your articles published on other high-profile websites (such as a local newspaper, or an industry-leader’s website)
  • running an active social media presence for your business

Not only does building and marketing your expert content build your rankings online, but it also builds credibility for you as an individual, and for your business.

Think about it. When someone finds you on Google, they don’t know you from a hole in the wall. But when they arrive on your site to find content that answers all their questions, they can’t help but be convinced to call you.

Great content builds traffic, and simultaneously increases your conversion rate. If you want to get your website ranked on Google, build content. We recommend either;

  • writing the content yourself
  • hiring a writer to interview you (the expert), and write the content for you.

Unless you can find a writer who coincidentally is an expert in your field (it does happen occasionally), we wouldn’t recommend just hiring any old writer to “research” it themselves.

They’re likely to recycle the same-old information that’s available online, providing little real value to your visitors; Google notices that type of thing. At the very least, they need to interview someone who is an expert in your field (but who better than you, or one of your knowledgeable employees?).

In the final part of this series, we’ll talk about some ideas for you to write about that can really provide value for your visitors, and drive paying customers to your website.

How Does Google Work? (Part 1)

Click.

If you have a website for your business, then you know that your goal is to “get the click” from potential customers to your website.

Where is that click coming from? It could be social media or from an email, but most likely it’s coming from Google. Getting ranked highly on Google’s search results is a vital part of “getting the click”.

Getting on the 1st page of Google is much easier said than done, so knowing why Google would put you on the 1st page can help you learn how to do it.

How Google Works

Like any business, Google provides a service.

When John’s car breaks, he goes to a mechanic. When his sink plugs, he calls a plumber. And when he needs to find something online, he goes to Google.

Google helps you find information online. How do they get paid? Through the online ads you see when you search. Because they’re paid whenever you click on an ad, it’s in their best interest to keep you (the searcher) coming back.

How do they keep John coming back every time he needs something? By delivering the best websites possible! That keeps him from going to competing search engines like Yahoo! or Bing.

If John’s mechanic fixes his car poorly, what do you think he’s going to do next time? He’ll go to another mechanic of course.

In the same fashion, if Google fails to deliver what you were looking for, what will you do? Go to another search engine!

With all those Google motives in mind, how do you make sure that your website gets found on Google?

By delivering the best results!

Location, Location, Location…Not On The Web!

With your offline business, location if a key facet. But on the web, there is no “location”, there’s only…

…information!

The valuable information that you write from your real-world experience about your industry is your new “location”, and is what will get you rankings on Google.

So instead of “location location location”, now it’s:

Information, information, information (at least online it is).

If you want your website to be ranked organically (without buying Google ads) on the first page of Google, you’ll need to provide top-notch information about your industry.

Sometimes a client hires us to write content (information), because they don’t have the time or know-how to write it themselves. In order to get the best information for our clients, we tend to interview them about a certain subject and take notes. Most business owners are not trained to write, so having a professional writer picking their brain can help to create:

  1. credible information (because it’s coming straight from YOU, the business owner)
  2. well-written content (because it’s being written and formatted by a professional writer)

If you have the writing skill and time, then you can do it yourself. You’ll want to write content that is both in-demand (people are searching for the topics you’re writing about), and relevant to your industry.

Stuck on “what to write”? Here’s an endless idea:

What questions do your customers ask? Anything that a customer might want to know is worth writing about.

Go overboard on your content and write something excellent that answers your customer’s questions better than your competitors websites do. Once you’ve done that, it leaves a question:

Now that you’ve written the best valuable content about your niche, how does Google KNOW that it’s the best? After all, they aren’t going to physically read all the billions and billions of pages on the web, are they?

We’ll cover this in part 2 of this article series, “how does Google know who has the best information?”