There is a lot of emphasis on growing your business through new customer acquisition. But, it is much cheaper to actually retain an existing customer than to go out through the full life cycle of a sales funnel, and acquire and close a new customer. So today, we shift the topic away from SEO sales and focus on SEO customer retention. Additionally, we are specifically interested in the use of phone tracking as a retention tool. Watch the short video to learn more.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our video today on seo sales and seo customer retention. I'm Chad Hill, and I have Adam Stetzer here with me as well. Hi, good afternoon, Chad. There's so much emphasis on getting leads and growing your business through new seo customer acquisition. Yeah, we've all seen the statistics. And it is much cheaper to actually retain an existing customer than to go out through the full life cycle of a sales funnel, and acquire and close a new customer.
So today, we want to shift the topic a little away from SEO sales and maybe focus on seo customer retention. And I'm specifically interested in this idea of using phone tracking as a retention tool. There's been a lot of discussion on our forum and our SEO reseller community. And there was a great quote today from one of our account managers, who said, you might as well just preemptively fire yourself if you don't put phone tracking into your campaigns.
So let's talk about seo sales and seo customer retention for our viewers. Let's start first with what is phone tracking mechanically and technically? What does it do? And then let's transition, Chad, into how it factors into the seo customer retention equation.
All right. Well, phone tracking, when you're dealing with small businesses, especially service businesses, is a critical thing for measuring the return on a marketing campaign. So what phone tracking is is it's the ability to buy or rent a number that either is a local number with the same area code as your primary number or could also be an 800 number. But what you do is you take that number and you're able to point that number back to your primary business line.
So effectively, it's just a redirected number. But what it allows us to do is it allows us to measure the number of people who call that phone number. They ultimately end up talking to you, just like they would if they called your primary business line. But we're able to change the number they see on your website depending on where they're coming from on the web, whether that's from a Google organic search or a Bing organic search or a paid search chat. We can switch the number out on your website. And then we're able to count how many phone calls you're getting, and even record those phone calls, so you can see, were they good seo sales lead calls or were they just typical customer service calls. So that's phone tracking.
OK. Yeah. Excellent, excellent coverage there. And I know phone tracking is a very complicated topic for people who've never thought about this. So just to let that sink in, it's the ability to selectively show different numbers based on where people came from before they got to your website.
All rings at the same place. So if you just think about it that way, it's sort of like analytics for your phone. And so with that backdrop, you can understand why we push it in the SEO sales process so much, because more data is always better to be able to show the effectiveness. And oftentimes, phone calls are not tracked nearly as closely as visits to a website. Yet we find 40% to 50% of real highly qualified leads come through phone calls.
So understanding that technology-- maybe you don't, and you need to play that part of the video over and over again until it sinks in. But let's just for now assume you do. Chad, let's transition to, then, why is that great for seo customer retention? What should I be doing to help retain? Everyone wants to make their search engine optimization engagements longer and more lucrative. How does this technology then help you?
I think it does two things. First of all, it allows you to have a conversation with your customer, to tell them what their website is producing. Forget about the campaigns you're running for just a second. It's just a great way of helping them get more value and understand how their business is operating. So any time you can be an adviser to a business and help them understand where their phone calls are coming from, and even help them understand, are their employees doing a good job answering those phone calls, that's a great place to start.
Switching to SEO, and measuring and making sure that you increase your seo customer retention, what it allows you to do is not just be focused on the rankings and the traffic, but be able to really tie some of that search traffic to business that customer brings in. Because everyone comes in thinking that a lead should only $20, or a customer phone call to me is only worth $50. But when they actually hear the phone calls and they realize, hey, wow, that was a big roofing job I got off of an organic search. That job was probably worth $5,000 or $10,000 for me. I've definitely paid for my SEO. So when they hear that and they connect the customer to the program you're running, you're much more likely to keep that customer for the long run. Excellent. Excellent. So again, just a little primer on phone tracking. We're talking to our SEO resellers today who have not embraced this technology. I know there's a great emphasis on SEO sales, trying to bring in those leads, trying to close those customers.
But we also know there's a large portion of our SEO reseller community that has done that fairly well, and is now struggling with keeping them around past 6, 9, or 12 months. They want to turn those into three year customers, because they know the return for them. Building that relationship, seo customer retention for them is so high. And that relationship can, of course, grow.
So here's a pitch for using phone tracking, this phone tracking technology that will automatically switch the number based on how the person came to the website, allow you also to record the phone calls, to have enhanced data, as Chad said, and actually listen to the phone calls and be able to proactively call your customers and say, hey, I was listening to this sales call. It got answered by Joe Salesperson, and I don't think they handled it particularly well. Really transform your relationship from just the SEO account manager to a consultant who's helping them to do better in their sales process. If you can turn that corner, you'll grow your SEO sales, because they'll come to you for more and more things, and you'll also retain that customer for much longer.