108: Office Hours | Call Tracking for SEO: Why Phone Calls Are the Missing Half of Your Conversion Data with Dorit Sasson

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor. I'm your host, Danny Gavin. And together with industry leaders and marketing experts, we'll explore the meeting point of mentorship and marketing. We'll discover how these connections have affected careers, marketing strategies, and lives.

Now get ready to get human. Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Mentor. Today's office hours episode is a little different. Rather than diving into a team single client case study, we're breaking down one of the most important overlooked pieces of SEO reporting.

Call tracking. Phone calls can make up as much as 50% of a business's total conversions, and yet most SEO reporting completely misses them. Today we're going to talk about how call tracking works, why it changes everything, and how businesses can set it up the right way. Today I'm pleased to bring back our SEO manager, Dorit Sasson, to provide some insightful color to this topic.

Dorit was recently featured on another episode, number 102, which we'll link in the show notes. Our previous conversation got into the path that led her to specialize in SEO and gave perspective on the human side of search. Given the focus of today's episode, I'm thrilled to chat with Dorit again, as she has deep experience implementing call tracking setups across industries, including multi-location and high-call volume clients like Heartlink's ABA. We're going to talk through the challenge, the strategy, real examples, what to watch out for, and the pro tips we've learned from auditing hundreds of accounts.

Let's dive in. Dorit, thanks again for joining me today. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

So I thought we could start by framing the concept of call tracking to give our audience some context around why this topic is so important. Let's first talk, let's define what is call tracking. So the way I informally see it is it's another way to track where your traffic is coming from through through different traffic sources using the actual call feature, right? You're making a phone call, you're tracking those phone calls.

So that is the informal definition of what it is as far as application. It can be found on a Google business profile, it can be found in a Google ad. It can be found organically. And so all of those traffic sources lead to one type of a call tracking metric.

To fill in the on the technical side of things, what that basically means is there are softwares out there like CallRail. At Optage, we use call tracking metrics. And what you do is we put a little piece of JavaScript onto the website. And then depending on where the visitor comes from, that JavaScript will switch out the phone number that's on the page.

So let's say your phone number is 713-777-7707. Now, when you come from Google Organic Search, then we switch it out to be 713-666-66666. And then when someone then calls that phone number, we're able to say, oh, cool. We got an actual phone call that came from organic search.

Which is extremely cool. It's extremely cool. And the interesting thing, and what we're going to talk about today, is a lot of people think about call tracking when it comes to paid ad campaigns. And when you think about like a unique phone number on a billboard, a unique phone number on that sign in the subway, dynamic tracking when we're doing Google ads.

But very not often do we think about it as something that's important to an SEO campaign. So I think it's pretty cool that we're covering that today to kind of shine light on call tracking in general, but then also how it affects SEO. And it does affect SEO in a big way. It really does.

So how often do you run into clients who rely heavily on phone calls, right? Instead of, let's say, forms, but aren't tracking them? I would say almost every client has some way of not like not conveniently ignoring it, but isn't aware of how important it is to their strategy. For me, for one of the clients that we're about to talk about, that is almost like an essential to their business because it's a local SEO type play.

But for many clients, it's not something that they are implementing in general. I mean, I come from, you know, another world a little bit, and that was not even something that was done, called tracking metrics. I mean, some of these big organizations are missing out on a big opportunity. So, from your perspective, whether exactly you know or what you think, why do you think so many businesses miss call data when they think about SEO reporting?

You know, it's interesting because traditionally SEO has been reported across traditional performance metrics, right? So you have the clicks and the impressions, and you have the conversions. And that's what people today still think about when they think of what an a good SEO-related outcome. And so that's that's the hindrance, in my opinion, is that they're not thinking of it in a different way.

They're used to the traditional way of what reporting looks like. And we know that that is changing. So I mentioned that you know, some businesses up to 50% of their business could come through the phone. Do you have a sense of what percentage of conversions or phone calls for most of the clients that you work with?

We're seeing a range between 10% up to 80%, which is huge, which is huge. And we've done a little bit of digging and we've seen that that range, you know, depends also on the industry. It depends on the type of business that they're in, whether it's local play or not. But still, when you think about the amount of conversion opportunity that's offered there, it's pretty high.

80% is a pretty high play. Yeah. I mean, and then just practically I imagine if 80% of your conversions are coming from a metric that you're not even tracking, what kinds of decisions do teams would then typically get wrong when not having this data? They would be blindsided, really.

They're blindsided because of that. Then, of course, that just cascades into a strategy. They are not developing the strategy uh in a robust way. So that piece of that huge strategy is missing.

There is a huge gap, obviously. And then over time, you can imagine that this lack of reporting is just like a whole conversion opportunity, but it's also a whole content strategy, really. It's like you're missing an entire audience. You're not catering to them in that way.

So I know call tracking here at Optage, we've been doing for many, many years. Uh, you coming into Optage, it was a relatively new area that we focus on. So, what made you so passionate about improving call tracking setups for SEO clients? Yeah, so this is a really interesting question.

Glad you asked it because really I came from, you know, like, wow, there's an opportunity. Here's an opportunity. Let's optimize a page. We see a keyword, it's doing well, blah, blah, blah.

All of a sudden, you're like, I'm going by a call number and up looking at it in a different way. So, a quick example on this is that, you know, when we look at call tracking, we look at it through different sources. And one of the things that really drove my passion button up to the ceiling and beyond was the idea that you can actually, a person can land on a page, a user, organically and make a phone call. I know it sounds really silly, but it's really an opportunity.

And when you see pages that need that love and all of a sudden they're getting the love and they're getting recognized through a tracking system, then that's a really cool thing to see. Some of these pages were doing well, but they could do better. Enter an optimization strategy. I go in, I do a little bit of, you know, abracadabra here, abracadabra there, optimize here, look at different ways that the LLMs are looking at this page, optimize H2s, optimize the meta data.

And then, you know, you're like, okay, then you just move on with your life, with your work, and then you go back and you have this reporting experience, and you're looking at it from a different perspective. And then all of a sudden, these pages that you optimized a month or two months before, users are landing on. Users are making calls from. And then you're the wheels start turning in your head, and then you're like, well, why are they making a call from this page?

And then you look at the page, and then you try to walk in their shoes and try to imagine like what brought them. You're trying to walk through that user journey with them. And I really start to walk those shoes with them and try to see, well, because then I can listen to their audios, and then I can imagine what it is that they were thinking and what were they looking for? What did they need help with?

What did that page actually solve for? Where did they get their information? You know, and they're combing from Carolina. Did that local page give them that inspiration, insight, answers, whatever?

You know, and and that, and I'm just trying to see how does that website cater to that micro moment? And that is a cool thing because when I see more multi-organic searches coming through, uh tracking sources coming through, all of a sudden I'm like, yeah. And that gets me all fired up because that is like gold for me. It is.

It's so powerful. And it's so cool that you're looking at it that way, right? Because so often we want to know, right? Like a lot of people run UX software.

So they track people that come to the page where they click. And this is like so much deeper than that because by listening to that phone call, you actually can hear what their problem was and was that solved on the page or not? Was it missing? How informed are they on the call?

How much more education do they need? Wow, that is that is so cool. And I'll I'll just add that I'm a very human-centered SEO person. I know that this is very technical and very data-driven.

But when I see a low conversion, my head is not saying, how do I get this page to convert? Or why are the conversions on this site low to begin with? I'm looking at it, uh, you know, I can't solve for all the conversion problems all at once because that's unrealistic. But when I do see a person land and that page starts to move the needle from one to three to five, then, you know, as Kevin O'Leary says from Shark Tank, then it's enough for me to wet my beak in the morning, you know, like he's a little bit different coming from the money side of things.

But I'm I'm like getting really fired up because then I'm like, something I'm doing is actually working. How are they finding us? How are they finding us? And then we can have this conversion conversation because you know, it's too early to start pushing them into a funnel where you don't even know, they don't even know if the page even exists and starts to exist, and they're finding it by whatever question they're putting into any AI tool, AI platform.

And that's where I think the hold is, because then you're like, well, how can I move the needle even further? Like where, where now that they've landed on the page and they made the phone call, what can I do to enrich that experience? And listening to actually those phone calls is really powerful because a lot of the work that I do is just, I'm just on the website, I'm thinking about a keyword. It's very lonely to some degree.

Lonely. It's not isolating in terms of lonely, but it's lonely because you're not really, you're not like walking in those shoes. This time you get to hear an actual person and you get to hear them, and that brings a lot of authenticity to the moment. All right, now we're going to move into more of the technical aspects of how call tracking actually works.

So I mentioned before that you put a piece of code and that the phone numbers switch. So at what actually that's called is dynamic number insertion. Basically, once again, this is when website phone numbers are dynamically replaced with source-specific numbers. So the system is able to detect did someone come directly from organic search?

Did someone come to the website directly through their web browser? Did they come through clicking on a Facebook post? Did they click on our Google Business profile and then come to the website? So a user clicking on a typical Google result and coming will see one phone number.

Then a user clicking from a Google Business profile may see another phone number. And the way that DNI knows what to do is often is because when someone comes from a different website, there's two things. Either in the browser itself can see who the referrer is, but then also you can set up rules based off of the URL, and there's different ways to set it up. Now, if you have a lot of traffic, it's not enough just to have one phone number per source.

What is recommended is that for every 20 visits that you get from a certain source, ideally you should have one phone number. So that means that if you're getting a hundred visits from a certain source, imagine if you're getting a hundred organic visits per day, then really you would need five phone numbers. And the reason that you need that is because the more phone numbers you have, the better the algorithm uh works to associate the person who came to the website and uh the phone call that was made.

Because the idea is that we can't know exactly a person comes to the site and then they make a phone call. It may be difficult to say exactly that this phone call happened connected to this visitor. When you have a little bit of visits, then that's easy. But the more you have, you need to switch out that phone number more often so that you can tie it.

And usually this tying of the phone call to the visitor, the match rate is anywhere from 95% to 100% most of the time, as long as you have enough phone numbers. So that's really like the technical side of things. The biggest misconception that clients have about using dynamic numbers is they're worried about using numbers that aren't their main number. And that's because they feel like someone might take that phone number, stick it into their phone book, stick it into their phone.

And let's say they don't use that phone number anymore, they're gonna have dialed and they're not gonna be there. But honestly, that doesn't really happen. If a phone number doesn't work, people can easily go back to Google and to search for that number and can find the the number. And the the pros totally outweigh the cons.

Because when we're able to track where did people come from and what actually caused those phone calls, then we can make better decisions on where to spend our marketing dollars. And that's really important. So, yes, there might be the one or two who take a phone number, they stick it into their phone book, and we decide two years later to then take that phone number and not use it anymore. And then when that person two years later is trying to call, he gets an unanswered, but the chance of that happening is usually very, very low.

Most probably be like, hey, maybe their phone number changed, go back to Google, find the right number, and it shouldn't be a problem. All right. So that covers the technical side. Let's now go marrying the technical together with organic.

Dorit, can you walk us through the three main ways that calls can happen from Google? Yeah, sure. So the first way is they land on the website through an organic search and they make a phone call from the page that they landed on. The second way is that they like they're in a local area and they Google the site or, you know, provider near me, ABA provider near me, they land on the listing and then they visit the website through the with listing or and then they make a phone call.

And then the third way is that they go through the first part of the Googling, and then they make the phone call from the listing without having to visit the website. Wow. So most people think of like organic search just being, okay, I go to Google, type it in, and then go ahead, I then I go to the website. But it looks like it's more than that, right?

Because especially in the local market, you have the interaction of the Google business profile, and then people can call from that or click on that to go to the website. So there are different ways that things can happen. So which of those paths do you think clients overlook the most? Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, I would have to say all three, because it's all part of the same umbrella from where I sit. I think they overlook the actual Google business um listing that they're right. So why is it so important to separate pure organic calls from calls that originate from the Google Business profile? Because it really can have an impact in the actual um optimization strategy and how you're um optimizing for both differently and distinctly.

Yeah. So especially for local businesses where for them, often in the Google search results, when people are searching for them, because like they say near me, or I need someone in Houston or in Pittsburgh, that map pops up. So making sure that they show up at that map is really important. And therefore we have to see like where are these calls coming from?

Where are these conversions coming from? Is it from the map? Is it from people coming from the website? If it's all lumped into one, it's really hard to be able to know.

It's like a doc. It's like if I don't do uh an MRI or a CT scan, and I and the person just says, I'm not feeling well, right? So we don't know, okay, well, which part of the body? Where do we have to actually go in and and fix it?

Right. So when setting up call track in metrics, uh sometimes you set it up based off of the URL. And in order for it to work properly, we have a rule, kind of like if in the URL it says GMB, then this is called the GMB source, and this phone number should show up. So I know that there was an issue where a UTM parameter, the URL was messed up.

Can you talk a little bit about what happened there and why does it matter? Yes. So if I can remember, that was a little bit of time ago, it seems like years ago, but really it was just a matter of fixing the UTM parameter so that they would be distinct and they wouldn't be blended in in terms of the same traffic sort tracking sources and the same traffic. And that way we were able to report on them distinctly.

So it had that cascade effect. This once we were able to solve for that, we were able to track it better. So now that you have telephone tracking for this client, what changed in the data? What have you seen?

What have you learned? Yeah, so it's just been a few months really. Optimally, it would be great to get a year's worth of data, you know, six months, and start to see real, real improvement. We've seen there's there's obviously other issues that we can look at, like website UX issues, UI issues, and that's something that we're also looking at, which can impact and affect conversions.

But I am seeing that the trade-off, the ROI of investment, investing in improving a page from an organic uh SEO, local SEO play, is having an favorable effect over time on some of the multi-organic channels that are coming in. So a page started with two visits, suddenly now is getting 10, which is which is really cool to see. Really, really cool. I remember the early days when there was zero and then it was one.

I mean, it may seem that those numbers are small, but it means that that that the numbers, even if it's a small number at the start, those are engaged people, the way I see it. They're engaged, they're learning about it, and it's just a matter of time that they will, there will be more and more to come. So that was a cool thing to note. So I was mentioning about what makes a qualified lead in terms of time versus calls.

So in this case, we the cutoff for our qualified leads was 45 seconds and up. And therefore, we could really gauge to see, you know, what kind of uh information exchange and what the pain points were, and any content opportunities. That we could take from these calls. That's really cool.

Do you have an example of like a topic or an article that you have added to your list that quite a few, actually? So somebody uh was calling from South Carolina, North Carolina, and they were landing on um a topic that is one of the highest performing articles called hand flapping. It's very it's symptomatic to autism, and and one of those articles spoke to that. So the person who landed on this through organic channels landed on this page on this article and then made the phone call.

So one of there was a, you know, made the phone call from that page. And then one of the things that that caller was asking about was, you know, how does the provider, if I, you know, start with um, you know, services, how will that help with my son who is at certain age? So does the symptom can can I get services to help with this age? So first of all, that was number one.

That's one of the important articles that we also have is you know, there's certain ages for autism, and that that is an important service information. And then the second thing was, you know, how how how soon can I get services? But then also, is this something that they can help me with? And then he mentioned hand flapping, um, finger flicking.

And I was just like, wow, how cool is that? Because that's exactly, you know, and I don't even know if he knew that we had those articles, the other articles that he was mentioning. And I was just like, wow, that's so, that's so cool. Sometimes it's not, they don't have all the, you know, top performing organic search terms that they're speaking to, but they're definitely very curious to get services started.

Yeah, that's so powerful because often, especially now in the year 2026, focusing on articles that are a little bit more higher up in the funnel, people are more research-based. It's really cool that you have an example here of someone came to the site because of more of a like research-based query, but then actually made a phone call and meant and mentioned that information. But I think it's also cool, and I don't know if you've done this, is the other topics that he mentioned, making sure that like in that hand flapping article, having the you know, linking out to those other articles, make it really easily available because potentially more people who are coming there are going through the same issues.

Yeah. I mean, the list goes on. There's just a bunch of them who are in the early stages of figuring out whether they need the services. So they're asking that.

And I'm just, it just really well rounds the experience because this is a very personal experience. A parent who's struggling and doesn't know whether or not their son or daughter needs that their child needs this kind of service, or a parent who's in it and is asking questions. I mean, you suddenly get such a human perspective that really well rounds the entire package almost. And it's a good, it's a really validating thing.

I I don't have another client that that comes close to this kind of experience. So let's kind of wrap up with lessons learned. What's the biggest lesson you've learned from setting up call tracking across different clients? Each one is its own strategy.

Each one requires its own, you know, call tracking, its own metric, and therefore it can lead to an opportunity, right? But it's it's hard to know that unless you don't know where those calls are coming from. That's the biggest nugget that I got is how to make sure that each channel is optimized or how to track them properly and so forth. What would you do differently if you were training a brand new SEO in call tracking?

Making sure that they know the difference between all three of those tracking channels. Because sometimes I myself I'm like, okay, did I say that right? That would be the first. And I think also just helping them understand that this is another important way to look at SEO from you know strategy and from implementation.

I think you know a lot of practitioners are early in their careers and they're maybe even mid, they they too are you know used to doing it the performance metric way, you know, the same impressions, the clicks. I I mean, I have a lot of colleagues who don't use call tracking metrics. It's just like, I don't know, what's that? Not for lack of want.

It's just some of them aren't using it, some of them are not. And I think it's a great thing to be exposed to it early on, to know that this is another pay, another place to put your energies and your strategy and your work. And how important are regular audits? Making sure that everything's set up, you have enough phone numbers, nothing's like falling through the cracks.

I would say a quarter. I think we haven't done we haven't gotten to that point where we've done a full audit yet, but I think it would make sense to wait until you had enough data and you've gotten to know a little bit more about the client to do a full audit. One last thing that I would want to add is um with multi-location companies and they've got multiple phone numbers, like let's say they've got one phone number for Georgia, one for North Carolina, you're able to purchase different phone numbers for different locations.

So even if there's more than one phone number on the page, but you can say that, okay, for the Georgia phone numbers when they're coming from Google Organic, it's uh there should be a Georgian number that shows up. So a number that has a Georgia area code. For the North Carolina one, a North Carolina phone number should show up with a North Carolina error code. So you can you don't basically you can further go and customize the phone numbers that you set up so that they match the location as well.

And often that's better than just having like a bunch of 800 numbers or 888 numbers in order in order to still keep that local feel. Would you feel like that also adds to credibility? There would be some kind of credibility to it, or would that not play out? I think when you're when we're dealing with local businesses, naturally, when you have like a nationwide company that has an 800 number, it's very different than you know, a local number that I can call.

I think psych yeah from a psychologically it plays out. Psychologically plays out that this is a more of a homegrown company, they've got they've got a local presence, and I want to work with them. They're not just like this big company that's trying to take over. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, I agree with you. Any final thoughts that you want to share today? Keep working on the organic side.

I I find it continually a cool thing. I I really enjoy looking at the organic opportunities that come month over month. I I actually look forward to them. That's the first thing that I that I do.

Not to relate to the other two channels, but I enjoy seeing because a lot more calls come in through the Google Business Listings and less so on the organic. And I really, really see uh that as an important channel as well. So it needs love. Well, thank you so much, Dorit, for joining me today.

You can't make great SEO decisions without seeing the full picture. And I think you were the perfect person to illustrate this story for us. Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's a it's a beautiful story.

This is just one of the many ways we hope to lean into learning data-driven decision making and transparent marketing practices this year on the podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation, there's a lot more of this coming your way through 2026. Thanks for joining this office hours episode of the Digital Marketing Mentor. We'll see you next time.

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