Can I use DNI on third-party business profiles?

No, typically you cannot use DNI on third-party websites.

How Call Tracking and DNI Affect Your SEO

So, you want to use call tracking to help measure your marketing campaign, but you’re unsure of how it might affect your SEO. It’s true that call tracking can negatively affect your website’s SEO if you’re not careful. We’ll tell you how call tracking affects your SEO and how you can use dynamic tracking insertion to make sure you don’t lose any search value on your web pages.

Table of Contents

Definition of SEO

Before we discuss how call tracking affects your SEO, let’s first talk about the definition of SEO. SEO is a term that is thrown around quite a bit lately, but maybe you’re not sure of the exact definition. SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of utilizing various tactics, strategies, and techniques to increase organic web traffic from search engines.

Definition of Call Tracking

Call tracking, or phone call conversion tracking, is a kind of marketing analytics technology. Businesses and marketing agencies utilize call tracking solutions to measure how their digital advertising, website, and offline marketing strategies drive inbound calls, and to determine the quality of those calls at scale.

Call Tracking Services

There are several different vendors and types of inbound call tracking software available.

One of the most popular is CallRail. CallRail procures a tracking number that forwards to your main phone number. It gathers data for you so you can track it online in real time.

Another popular call tracking software is Invoca. Invoca is a conversation intelligence platform that helps you immediately act on the information customers share during these interactions.

These services are beneficial because they offer many helpful features beyond just call tracking.

Call Tracking and SEO

In order to optimize the online presence of your business, it’s important to stay consistent across the internet with your company’s defining characteristics. These include your company’s name, address, phone number, etc. That is why it is not ideal to have several different addresses, multiple company names, and various phone numbers attached to your one business. It is both safer and better for your SEO to stay consistent with these characteristics. If a search engine can’t determine exactly what your business is, and where it is located, it is less likely to serve your business to searchers. In order to optimize your business online in the best way possible, you need to use the same phone number everywhere. Otherwise, you do risk hurting your SEO.

Definition of Dynamic Number Insertion

This is where dynamic number insertion, or DNI, comes in. Dynamic number insertion refers to the technology that is used in call tracking in which a specific phone number dynamically displays on a web page according to the source of the visit to that page. With DNI, you use the same hard-coded phone number across your site. Then, the number swapping happens in JavaScript after the web page loads. The search engine bots will still see the same phone number hard-coded in the HTML throughout your website. However, human visitors to your website will see different phone numbers.

This tech helps protect the SEO value of your business’s phone number. Using DNI call tracking software lessens the risk of hurting your SEO by swapping out phone numbers in order to trace the source of your calls.

What About My Phone Number on Business Profiles on Third-Party Sites?

Here’s where it gets a little trickier. Are you using third-party websites to list your business profile? Good! You should be. However, using dynamic number insertion on other websites is typically not an option. Therefore, you need to hard-code the tracking numbers on those profiles. It’s time to make a tough decision.

For example, if you place a call tracking phone number that is different from your business’s main phone number on a local business listing or social media page, you could end up hurting your local SEO. Using dynamic number insertion on websites does eliminate most of the SEO risk of using different phone numbers, but using DNI is not typically an option. In this case, it’s up to you. What are your priorities? Is it worth it to use a tracking number on one profile in order to obtain call source data, or is it too much of a risk for your SEO? The choice is up to you.