Even before you hire an SEO to do some work on your website, you really need to know what you’re getting for your hard earned money.

The great thing about SEO is that nearly all of it is trackable.  Every website visitor leaves a nice trail when they come by, and over time you can collect that data and sort through it for patterns, good or bad.  Then, armed with that data, you can make changes that increase the amount of clickthroughs, or even move things around on your page to help influence a higher purchase rate.

However, none of this is possible if you aren’t collecting the data.

Google analytics is arguably one of the best (and free) analytics collection programs on the market today.  Setting it up for your website is a breeze, just sign up and add the code they provide you to each page of your website.

This will do a couple of nice things for you, even before you hire an SEO to start spiffing up your site.

You’ll set a baseline of visitors

You have to know what is already going on on your website before you hire an SEO.  Knowing your baseline of visitors over a week or month will show you the impact of the things you have already done to promote your website.  If it shows an average of 20 visitors a week, then you know that if it increases to 30 and then 40, that your SEO is actually doing things for you.

You can track landing pages

If you’re really not into SEO, or not into marketing at all, chances are you are promoting your home page URL as the place to go.  But what happens if your page on custom widgets is getting tons of traffic, and you had no idea?  You may already have a great web page that doesn’t have a good call to action, and you don’t even know it!

You can see which search engine is referring traffic

Not sure if your visitors are coming from Yahoo!, MSN or Google?  A good analytics program will tell you where your strong points are, helping your SEO focus on boosting those rankings and growing the others into a mature state as well.

You can see geo-information about your visitors

What if you’re a blue widget maker who only sells in Missouri?  And what if 85% of your visitors are living in Washington?  It doesn’t do you much good if you only sell to Missourians.  Know where your current traffic is coming from, and adjust accordingly.

Summary

I know this post is a bit down-n-dirty, but I hope I’ve made the idea clear.  Go get signed up for Google Analytics today.  Get it set up on your account, and then start looking for a good SEO company to help you improve your baseline.

Our newest service is one of the coolest things I’ve seen to come to the SEO field in a while now. The new call tracking is leading edge lead tracking at it’s best. Plus, you can use it for more than just tracking calls, you can use it to improve the overall service of your company as well, which I’ll discuss shortly below.

So what is this call tracking service all about?

Well, let’s use an imaginary company, ABC Widgets for this example. ABC has been in business for ten years, and sells widgets commercially as well as in their three stores across the US. They also have a website which they’ve put a little money into making nice, and they spend about $1000/month on SEO, a good start.

ABC’s owner, Bill, is a bit ‘old school’ and not totally sold on paying $1000/month to his SEO guy, which his company hired in January. Bill sees that there has been an increase in revenue from April to now, but he can’t pin it all on SEO. During the early months this year, he also put a big ad in the Yellow Pages, and he pays his web provider a monthly fee to “be listed on their site(s)”. He doesn’t know what that means, but the increase in leads/sales since April makes him think it’s working.

Bill’s website is a typical site, showing all his widgets and their various styles and shapes. The widgets are heavy and cumbersome, so shipping is not an option. Because of that, the website doesn’t actually have a full “shopping cart experience”, customers must call or contact ABC in order to purchase their widgets. Bill is very happy with the look of the website, and the company gets several email leads a week from it. So Bill knows that the website is producing some income, although he doesn’t track it completely.

For instance, many times new customers call and want to order items, or want to visit a local store to try out his widgets. Between his Yellow Pages ad, the postcard mailer he just did (which cost a small fortune!) and the website, he has several ways that these customers could have come about finding his phone number. Problem is, he doesn’t know where they originally found him, and his sales guys are not good at all at asking customers how they found their company in the first place.

One day, Bill’s SEO guy tells him about our call tracking service. Here’s how the conversation may have gone:

SEO Guy: Bill, we should sign up for this call tracking. To summarize, it dynamically changes the website phone number to a different number, which then forwards to our number. Anyone who visits the website will only see this number, and we’ll 100% know that the call originated from online.

Bill: Interesting. So we get a new phone number just for our website?

SEO Guy: Yes. The number forwards to our local sales line, so the customer experience doesn’t change at all, but we’ll have stats. It even records the calls so we can listen back to them later.

Bill: So we can listen to the calls and see how our sales staff is handling them?

SEO Guy: Yep. You can even use it to see how ‘up to date’ our staff is with the website items, and you can track your website conversions separately from other ad campaigns.

Bill: What is this going to cost?

SEO Guy: It looks like there’s a $99 setup fee, and then a monthly fee of around $40. On top of that, we pay 10c per minute for the incoming calls.

Bill: So if you’re not really doing your job, I’ll know it because it won’t cost me much.

SEO Guy: I suppose you’re right. And if the Internet really is generating all that revenue, you’ll know it.  I can log into their interface and produce reports that will show exactly how many calls originated from the website, when they were, and even the phone numbers that they originated from.

Bill: What if I want another phone number for, say, our magazine ads? Can I track other ad streams too?

SEO Guy: Yeah. Each phone number costs an additional monthly fee, but adding these don’t incur additional setup fees. We can get local or toll-free numbers for the same price. So we can track the website, magazine ads and whatever else you want, and every phone call still rings here just like before.

Bill: Do it.

For the longest time, there was no real way to track leads that came from a website visitor who called instead of filling out a ‘contact us’ form. Since the website doesn’t actually sell the item (there’s no credit card or other purchase transaction online), ABC relies on the website to push those leads to their contact form or the telephone, which causes tracking problems.

Our new call tracking service fills this gap in the process. Now Bill knows that his SEO efforts are definitely paying off, and that his magazine ads are useless. His SEO guy is happy too, because Bill doesn’t fuss about writing him a check every month any more.

Our call tracking service is available whether or not you are an SEO client of ours. If you are an SEO, contact us about how you can partner with us to offer this to your clients as well.

Our newest service to help businesses grow and succeed will launch on Monday September 22nd. We are really excited about this service, as it will help you with the age-old problem of tracking those phone calls that were generated from the website. Now you’ll know just which phone calls were from the web, and which ones were pure walk-in.

Check out our new call tracking page and let us know if you have any questions!