NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) consistency is one of the most critical ranking factors for local businesses on the internet. Businesses must display a consistent phone number on their website and in local directories (Google Local, Yelp, Facebook, etc) in order to achieve maximum visibility online. CallRail has taken great measures to ensure that our JavaScript snippet and call tracking have no impact on NAP. This article covers two methods of implementing call tracking without affecting NAP.
Getting started
NAP consistency is a top priority for many CallRail users. This article is intended to be a supplement to the more advanced breakdown of CallRail and NAP Consistency posted on the CallRail blog:
The Advanced CallRail Guide to NAP Consistency.
The importance of NAP consistency
When clients search for your business online, they should find it on their first try. NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) consistency assures that your business’s information is the same across directories, citations, and search engines. It is widely thought to be a primary ranking factor for local search on Google. If different names, phone numbers, or addresses for your company are floating around online, search engines are less likely to display the correct business information and therefore less likely to display your business.
CallRail's dynamic number insertion (DNI) feature is powered by a small snippet of JavaScript. This script looks at the referring URL and landing page of the website visit and determines whether or not to replace the phone number on the website with one from a website pool. Our DNI technology has been engineered to serve the same code and user experience to human visitors and bots alike. This means CallRail's methods are consistent with Google's guidelines and will never serve a phone number in a way that would jeopardize your NAP consistency.
The "track all calls" method
The "track all calls" method is CallRail's recommended way of maintaining NAP consistency while installing our JavaScript snippet on your site.
This will require you to port your number into CallRail and set up visitor tracking. Porting a business number into CallRail gives it features like call recording, advanced call routing, and call analytics. Porting numbers in and out of CallRail is always free and we will never keep a number from your business when you are ready to port it out.
Port a Phone Number into CallRail.
If you don't want to port an established number into CallRail, you can create a local offline tracking number to use as your main line number. It's important to know that after creating a brand new main line tracking number, it is still possible that your existing business number could appear online. Mike Blumenthal covers this possibility and makes several suggestions in his blog on call tracking and local SEO.
Main line tracking numbers won't allow you to attribute calls to their exact marketing campaigns, but they will give further insight into the calls that are coming from work you've done on citation cleanup and listing optimizations. It's important to focus on the "first-time callers" performance metric when implementing a main line tracking number as it will inform how many inbound leads are coming from your local SEO work.
Once your main line tracking number is set up and placed on your website and around the web, you're ready to create a website pool. Website pools gives you much more data about the callers who visit your website and how they got there by creating a pool of numbers that are swapped in for the main line tracking number that's been placed on your website.
The "main line only" method
It is possible to track callers who are finding your number online using only a main line tracking number. This is a number you will have to manually place everywhere online and it will not affect your NAP consistency. CallRail recommends the “Track All Calls” method for the most detail about incoming calls; however, the “Main Line Only” method still gives some visibility into call volume and call recordings from local SEO efforts.
How to Create an Offline Tracking Number.
You won't see if a call is coming from your own website or somewhere else on the web, but you will still know it came from your online presence. These calls can still be recorded and you will still have access to the caller's information.
