Local SEO (search engine optimization) professionals have long wished for more effective ways to measure the effects of their efforts. Most notably, unlike some other forms of SEM (search engine marketing) and offline mediums, we cannot use tracking telephone numbers or URLs. Additionally, we cannot account accurately for customer walk-ins. These restrictions are inherent to the very nature of the discipline of local SEO. Fortunately, there are some very visible and meaningful indicators we can monitor, such as rankings for Google searches. Below, I detail the nature of the inherent restrictions mentioned above.
Tracking Telephone Numbers & URLs
As described in our post, Dangers of Changing Your Name, Address, Phone, or URL, search engines use the combination of a businesses name, address, phone number, and URL (NAPU) to know when a business is mentioned on the internet. And, any inconsistencies in a businesses NAPU lead to reduced relevance and rankings. For this reason, swapping out a business’ regular phone number for a tracking telephone number anywhere on the internet is detrimental. The same goes for tracking URLs. And, because of the way websites share information with each other, one seemingly-innocent tracking number or URL on just one website can quickly turn into a large number of conflicting mentions about a business. For this reason, we cannot use tracking telephone numbers or URLs to track leads resulting from local SEO. In addition, we require that our clients do not permit any other party to use tracking telephone numbers or URLs to monitor phone calls for their business online.
Customer Walk-ins
Another challenge when attempting to measure the benefits of local SEO is that, by nature, good local SEO promotes your business location. For industries that commonly service their customers on location, this is less of a concern; but for businesses that commonly service customers from a brick-and-mortar location, there is no accurate way to measure how many walk-in customers result from SEO or SEM (search engine marketing). We encourage our customers to be in the habit of asking their customers how they found them, which can help.
