How to use call tracking software for advanced keyword research

Keyword research is the backbone of successful SEO and involves finding words that internet users type into Google and other popular search engines. These keywords are important because they show how people use search engines and what words and phrases they use to search for products, services, or information.

It basically boils down to getting a better understanding of your audience and their pain points so you can help them solve their problems. Conducting keyword research will allow you to optimize your content around common and relevant terms. This will improve your organic traffic that will further help you rank better and attract an audience that wants your solution.

Now, there are many ways to level up your keyword research and one of them is with the help of call tracking software.

This software offers a lot of options that you can use for advanced keyword research. That is because call tracking software allows you to hear your audience and figure out specific expressions or jargon they use.

Using call tracking software for advanced keyword research will make sure you are optimizing your content with the right keywords. In this article, we’ll show you how to use it to the fullest.

Who Should Use Call Tracking Software?

A lot of industries can benefit from using call tracking technology but, for some, it’s a must. Those include, but are not limited to:

1. Automotive industry — Buying a car isn’t an easy decision and many people want to hear as much information as possible to make a purchase. Auto dealers can implement call tracking into their business to assess their marketing campaign effectiveness. It also provides information about the caller (location, previous interaction history) before answering the call, which results in better call forwarding management and saves time.
2. Healthcare — Healthcare companies usually advertise across multiple channels. Moreover, since they have vast call centers for customer support, call tracking software can help them monitor the performance in this sector. That can enable healthcare businesses to measure the performance of call center employees and see if there is room for improvement. This enables the healthcare industry to provide further staff training and to reorganize the whole process from answering to ending the call if needed.
3. Education — Education establishments use a myriad of marketing channels, so using call tracking to uncover the most profitable ones is crucial for their marketing success. The education industry can benefit by identifying the user personas that are most interested to sign up for a school program and discover where to allocate their advertising budget.
4. Legal — The legal industry is vast and the competition is tough and abundant. When people want to inform themselves or start using legal services, they use phone calls significantly more than online forms. That is why law firms should consider investing in call tracking software, as it will provide them with important information about their leads.

This will provide legal firms with a better understanding of which keywords to use. Plus, they’ll be able to map their customer journey to understand how people typically convert into customers. This can help them understand which legal services are most required and the demographics of those leads that are most interested in them.

1. Digital marketing — Call tracking is especially important in digital marketing. It can serve as an extra tool to measure and analyze all of the marketing efforts and extract valuable insights. It can also serve as an edge to beat the competition and can be offered as an additional service for clients.
2. SaaS — Call tracking for SaaS businesses will help them better handle their customers and create a more personalized customer service for them.
3. Real estate — In the real estate industry, it is important to know where calls are coming from and which advertisements convert the best. Besides, phone calls are widely used in this industry to get information about properties or schedule a meeting. This means that call tracking can provide real estate businesses with the ability to conduct advanced keyword research to develop a better understanding of and segment prospects.

Types of call tracking

There are various types of call tracking for different purposes and it is up to you, as the marketer, to identify the ones that best fit your desired objective. That said, here are some of the most popular types of call tracking:

• Visitor-level call tracking
• Keyword-level call tracking
• Customer support calls

We will now explain the specifics and uses of these options.

Visitor-level call tracking

Visitor-level call tracking collects visitors’ data and on-site activity across multiple channels and assigns a specific number for each visitor when they make a call to your business. This is an advanced way to get deep insights into your site’s visitors, as the name suggests. You can capture a customer’s journey from the moment they visit your site to the point when they decide to make a purchase.

You can map the customer’s journey like this by interlinking the phone call with a campaign or a keyword. Business owners can also integrate it with their CRM to expand the information about the activity and behavior of visitors while on their site.

Now, what enables this type of capturing the whole customer journey is DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion) technology. For example, when a person gets to your site by clicking a Google ad, DNI will replace the contact number on your site and give a unique number to the visitor. DNI then conjoins this dynamic number with the information about the location, keyword, or search engine the visitor used to get to the site.

When a visitor decides to make a purchase via a call, DNI will transfer the call to your on-site contact number. After the call ends, DNI also records additional information about the caller, such as their number, name, or location. Ending the call releases the previously allocated dynamic number and it can later be used for new visitors.

Depending on your audience and the extent of your digital or physical presence, you can choose from two types of numbers:

1. Local numbers — used to appeal to local audiences and stand out to local buyers or service users. It gives businesses a prefix that the local market uses.
2. Toll-Free numbers — Used for businesses with a global presence that have audiences across many regions. These numbers are free for every caller, hence the name “toll-free”.

The whole point of visitor-level call tracking is to figure out the exact pages or campaigns that incentivized visitors to make phone calls and establish the conversion path pattern they followed. That way you can optimize and restructure this path to improve your conversion rate and to get a better understanding of which content drives your leads.

The second valuable aspect of DNI is that it shows where the leads came from, whether it was an ad, online form, or an online campaign. By knowing this, businesses can identify the sources that most of their leads come from and organize their business around them. That can result in changing some of your business objectives, marketing campaigns, or advertisements to effectively optimize sources you previously identified as the most important.

Keyword-level call tracking

Call tracking software can record organic keywords that internet users type into Google. With this type of call tracking, DNI technology also has an integral role and is used similarly as for visitor-level call tracking.

A dynamic number that DNI assigns to each visitor (primarily to track the source they came from) also recognizes keywords tied to that source. This is vital because it helps you discover which keywords converted the most and which underperformed.

Furthermore, you can use these valuable insights to properly reorganize your budget and allocate it to those sources that get you the most leads. You can go a step further and identify the exact keywords that drive your leads and direct your budget to them. Performing advanced keyword research can make your PPC campaigns more profitable and effective.

You can also apply the best-performing keywords from one source that successfully drives leads to a different source that is under-performing.

For example, let’s say you identified a few conversion-driving keywords from your seasonal push campaign and you recognized them as organic as well. You also have a Google Ad campaign that isn’t so successful, with a poor conversion rate tied to a different set of keywords. You can tackle this challenge by replacing the under-performing keywords from the Google Ad campaign with those that performed the best from your seasonal campaign.

Improvising like this can cut additional expenses for keyword research and all it takes is a bit of creativity driven by the SEO principles.

Conducting advanced keyword research will allow you to explore the specifics and impact of each relevant keyword. Doing that can help you really get to the core of your customers’ pain points and develop a deeper understanding of them. These valuable insights can be used to improve current, as well as future, campaigns.

Customer support calls

Call center phone calls are one of the most sensitive parts of your business’ success. These calls offer a direct point of contact with your customers and being thoughtful when conducting them is essential. In particular, giving value to your customers through kindness, active listening,and ultimately helpfulness can make their experience remarkably satisfying.

Recording calls is a widely used method to improve customer support, which results in a better customer experience (CX) that is vital for any company’s ROI. You can also perform advanced keyword research with call recording to collect the words and phrases your customers use to get information and help or give feedback.

That way, you will have a vast pool of keywords that you can further analyze and determine the most frequent ones. You will also be able to pick up customers’ emotions behind these keywords and understand how they think and feel when they use them.

This is a great way to identify emotion-driven keywords and the next step is to properly apply them to your campaigns, advertising strategy, or website’s FAQ section. Furthermore, publishing content that’s optimized for these keywords will drive more traffic and possibly decrease the number of complaints.

Call tracking software provides a useful toolset to collect and store additional information about the caller and various integration options with popular CRM platforms. Along with pinpointing the sources of those calls, it provides additional information like the caller’s location and duration of calls. All of this will enable you to gather demographic and psychographic data to build strong user personas and provide exceptional customer support in the first place. Integrating call tracking software with call center software will serve to streamline customer support, improve response times, and lead to more personalized service. This results in higher customer retention, improved satisfaction, higher ROI, and a better understanding of the customer journey.

(Image Source)

To wrap things up, here is why you should consider integrating call tracking software with customer support calls:

• Higher customer retention
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Higher ROI
• A deeper understanding of the customer journey
• Improved customer experience
• Advanced keyword research to create content that converts

Google Ads and call tracking software

Google Ads (previously known as Google Adwords) is the biggest and the most popular PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising platform. In essence, businesses pay Google to target users based on many inputs (country, age, device type) and their desired keywords. Google then shows these ads to the selected audiences and promotes businesses’ products or services.

Linking call tracking software with Google Ads is a great decision that can be worthwhile in many ways. First off, it helps measure the quality of Google Ads campaigns and enables businesses to make calculated decisions about their advertisement and sales strategy. It also gives strong and accurate data to conduct advanced keyword research and pinpoint the essential keywords that drive campaigns.

Here is how call tracking paired with Google Ads roughly works.

When a prospect searches Google and clicks on your ad, they will get to your landing page that will show them a specific phone number or your custom phone number. That number is created with the help of DNI and is tied to the call tracking software you use. When that prospect decides to make a call, they will click this number and will automatically get transferred to your real business number.

Now, when the call starts, call tracking software will start capturing some of this information:

• Source of the call (Google Ads campaign)
• Demographic data of the caller (mostly location)
• Call duration
• The keyword that incentivized the call

You can use call tracking options to pull out extra information, like conversion rates from calls. This is done by setting a call duration time that, once exceeded, will be considered as a conversion. This isn’t the most precise method to measure conversion rates, but it gives you a decent overview of your most significant calls.

Reporting and analysis

The penultimate step of successfully harvesting the benefits of call tracking software is thorough and insight-driven analysis. After call tracking solutions give you an abundance of all kinds of data, you should know how to draw smart conclusions from it. These conclusions can be applied to many of your business decisions and strategies.

When keeping records of dozens of phone calls, it is hard to manually listen to all of them and take notes to gather all the important keywords. Luckily, it is easy to transcribe those calls and automatically analyze them with the help of AI-powered technology. AI basically pulls out important insights and marks certain keywords (selected from customers’ words and phrases) depending on how you set up the AI’s Automation Rules.

Additionally, Conversation Intelligence powered by AI offers many options to interpret and visually illustrate processed data via tag clouds and graphs. Using AI will save you time, money, and resources, leaving highly extracted conclusions to aid your decision-making.

Reporting on call tracking or advanced keyword research you’ve conducted is essential and doing it right will save you time and money. There are many tools to help organize your data in a form of predefined templates that show all the vital metrics and KPIs. Therefore, you can get conducive reports to help drive further decisions.

These tools are highly customizable to fit your own preferences when creating reports with your preferred metrics. Also, you can create report templates according to the metrics you consider important for each of your clients.

(Image source)

Call metrics can include:

• The conversion rate of inbound calls
• Marketing sources’ performance
• First-time callers
• Call volume for each source and landing page
• Ad spend
• Time of the day when phone call occurs
• Caller’s interaction history

Google Analytics is a widely used tool and it can be seamlessly integrated with a range of call tracking software. This synergy will expand your understanding and help collect even more information about the performance and specifics of calls. For example, you can use Google Analytics to create goals for calls to track them like conversions. You can also record a caller’s activity on your website even before they make a call.

Analytics can help you:

• Optimize sales and marketing strategies
• Help you allocate your resources in the best way
• Create customer profiles
• Identify customer sentiments

(GIF by ConceptCafe / MotionElements.com)

Conclusion

Call tracking software is what every serious business should be using to adjust its strategy and grow. The benefits are vast and call tracking solutions not only offer great versatility and insightfulness, but they also come with powerful integration options. Another important aspect is that businesses can get creative in how they use these tools and tailor them to obtain an array of information across multiple channels.

In that light, call tracking tools can be used for advanced keyword research that will give businesses an edge in their keyword strategy. Call tracking and SEO go hand in hand and their complementary use will help marketers get to the center of their customers’ pain points. This empowers businesses to build comprehensive content that converts and solves customers’ problems.

A business that is always on the lookout for new approaches to better understand its audience and improve its strategy has a great chance to succeed. The same goes for integrating call tracking software in order to give your business a fresh perspective supported by both quantitative and qualitative data. As a result, you should see noticeably higher conversion rates while getting closer to meeting business objectives.