Organic search has long been an important and reliable source of website visits and conversions for businesses. In a 2019 study from BrightEdge, organic search accounted for 53% of website traffic – the highest of any channel – with around 90% of that traffic coming from Google.
Google still dominates organic search today, but SEO and consumer behavior are changing thanks to AI. Consumers are researching and finding businesses in new ways using Google AI Overviews and AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Forty-two percent of users say they value AI for fast answers to complex questions, and 39% prefer the direct responses from AI platforms. Eighty percent of Gen Z say they have used AI search engines, with 30% using them frequently.
If you are a marketer responsible for SEO or website CRO (conversion rate optimization), none of this is news. You’ve probably been getting questions from your leadership team on how AI is changing your business’s customer journey, the impact of AI search engines on leads and conversions, and what you are doing about it.
If you are looking for a competitive edge to drive more website visitors, leads, and conversions in this new SEO world, phone calls to your business are your secret weapon. This blog explains why calls are so valuable to SEO marketers and outlines the best practices you can follow to generate more phone call conversions and revenue from AI search engines and Google.
If You Want to Drive More Revenue From SEO and AI Search Engines, Drive More Phone Leads
This is the first reason why I call phone calls your secret weapon for improving SEO. For most industries, phone calls to your business are the most valuable leads, converting to customers or patients at higher rates than web forms – and for more revenue.
If you are an SEO marketer in industries like healthcare, telecom, home services, insurance, financial services, automotive, or travel, 30% to 90% of your conversions come from phone calls.
Insights From Phone Conversations With Your Business Are SEO Gold
This is the other reason why phone calls are so valuable for SEO. The phone conversations your callers have with your business are one of the richest sources of insights for increasing organic search visits and conversions.
Every conversation contains a wealth of data on that caller’s intent, product or service interest, questions they ask before converting, pain points, preferences, sentiment, and more. This data comes straight from your consumers’ mouths, so it’s accurate. Plus, it comes from conversations they have directly with your business, so it’s proprietary — your competitors don’t have access to it.
As we cover later, SEO marketers can mine transcripts, summaries, and reports from phone conversations to learn new ways to optimize site content to drive more visits and conversions from AI search engines and Google.
7 Strategies to Drive More Phone Call Conversions From AI Search Engines and SEO
1. Benchmark Phone Leads and Conversions From SEO
The first strategy is to get accurate data on the phone leads and conversions you drive from organic visits from AI search engines and Google. Calls drive a high percentage of appointments and sales for many businesses, but not every call from SEO is a good lead and many that are still don’t convert on the call.
Understanding the volume, intent, and outcome of calls from SEO helps you benchmark performance and prove your impact on business results. Invoca can provide you with that data.
When someone calls your business after visiting your site from an organic link on Google or an AI search engine, Invoca tracks the source of the call – including the landing page they first visited – and uses AI to analyze the conversation to detect if the call was answered, if the caller is a lead, if they converted on the call.
Banner Health uses Invoca to measure how many appointment calls they drive from SEO to help prove marketing’s impact on patient acquisition. Invoca enables them to understand what pages are most effective at generating SEO visits that call and convert, as well as compare those results to calls from other channels like paid search and Google Business Profile listings to learn what’s really driving the best results.
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2. Track How AI Search Engines Are Impacting Your Customer Journey
It’s important for marketers to keep tabs on the impact AI search engines are having on your customer journey. What percent of new customers or patients came from an AI search engine? Which ones are driving the best results? Is that changing over time?
Invoca can show you which AI search engines are driving calls to your business, what percent of those calls are leads, and what percent converted to an appointment or sale. You can see which engines are driving the most calls from appointments and sales, and how that changes over time. Invoca can also show you what webpages are driving visits from high-quality leads from each AI search engine, so you can better understand what types of content are working best and create similar content to increase visits and leads.
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3. Integrate Phone Call Data From SEO With Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics
Passing phone lead and conversion data into website analytics platforms like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics gives you a complete view of SEO performance. With all your conversion data in one place, you can measure every SEO visitor's engagement with your site and the outcome of those sessions to make the right adjustments to your content and website strategy to improve results.
BBQGuys integrates Invoca with Adobe Analytics to track which webpage elements are generating the most sales calls. This allows them to A/B test click-to-call buttons and other call-based CTAs on their website — and get granular data about what drives the most calls to their sales center. By continually making these kinds of optimizations across their website, BBQGuys has driven a 16% increase in their phone call conversion rate and an 11% increase in average revenue per sales call.
4. Use Insights From Phone Conversations to Improve SEO Visits and Conversions
What callers say when they call your contact centers or locations is a goldmine of SEO insights. Invoca records, transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes every call to your business to provide SEO marketers with ideas for new content to improve organic visits and conversion rates. Some areas to examine include:
- Caller Questions: If your leads are asking a particular question when they call, other consumers may be searching for that answer online as part of their customer journey. Adding answers to caller questions to your product and service pages, FAQs, and blogs helps your site show up in more queries on AI search engines and Google. It can help you attract more qualified visitors and improve the likelihood they convert.
- SEO Keywords: Learn the actual words and phrases your leads use when discussing your products and services. They may be different from the words you use on your site now. Tailoring content to the voice of the customer helps them find you, improving SEO results.
- New Topics: See new topics callers are talking about with your business that you can leverage in your blogs and other website content to stay current and attract similar audiences.
- Why They Did or Did Not Convert: Are there particular features of your products or services that callers talk about that lead them to convert? Or things they don’t like that you should remove from your content? Phone conversations answer these questions to help you make better content decisions.
- Competitor Mentions: Knowing what callers say about your competitors and how they feel you compare – both what you do well and where you fall short – can show you new topics to add to your content to help improve SEO visits and conversions.
The marketing team at VITAS uses Invoca to understand their callers, whether they are a healthcare professional, family caregiver, or job candidate. Knowing the words they use on calls – including how leads describe the services they require – is key for VITAS’ SEO and content initiatives, from identifying high-value keywords to guiding their overall copywriting strategy.
Invoca also helps Atria Senior Living use data from conversations to drive more qualified phone leads to its communities. "Invoca helps us understand common questions people have when they call in, such as 'How big are the apartments?' and 'What is the food like?'" said Amie Spellman, Director of Digital Marketing at Atria Senior Living. "We can then update the website to answer those questions so that leads are even better qualified when they pick up the phone to speak with us."
5. Segment Callers Into the Right Audiences to Improve Digital Advertising Results
Phone conversations from AI search engines or Google SEO give you clear data on each caller’s intent and the outcome of the call. You use that data to segment callers into the best audiences to improve the performance of your search, social, and display campaigns. For example:
- For phone leads who didn’t convert, retarget them with ads for the product/service they called about to help more SEO leads convert to customers.
- For callers who converted, put them into the most relevant upsell or cross-sell campaigns. You can also add them to lookalike campaigns to target new consumers resembling your best SEO leads.
- For callers that aren’t leads or already converted over the phone, reduce wasted ad spend by suppressing them from seeing and clicking on your paid media ads.
6. Improve SEO Results by Improving Call Answer and Conversion Rates
No matter how well your SEO generates phone leads, your performance suffers if locations or contact centers aren’t converting them. It’s important for SEO marketers to know not just how many phone leads you generate, but if those calls are answered, assisted correctly, and converted. You can see benchmarks for your industry below – do you know what your numbers are?
Marketers can use Invoca reports to see what percentage of calls to each location or contact center agent are leads, abandon their call, go to voicemail, convert, and more. Use this data to determine if low conversion rates are the result of SEO issues or poor call experiences.
You can then use Invoca to take control of call routing and automate the right experiences to improve call outcomes from SEO. With Invoca’s intelligent call routing, CHRISTUS Health can automatically route patients based on their digital journeys before the call. This ensures they’re quickly connected with a relevant agent who can assist them. This reduces unnecessary transfers, cuts down hold times, and creates seamless patient experiences that generate conversions.
If your business has trouble converting phone leads from SEO, you can also use Invoca’s AI to analyze what contact center agents and location staff say on calls to detect issues.
Christian Brothers Automotive uses Invoca to detect if staff at their 270 locations use the company’s standard greeting when they answer the phone, if they initiate a request for an appointment, if they ask the caller if they have any questions, and if they close the call correctly. It helps ensure the phone leads their marketing team generates have the best chance at converting.
7. Increase Website Conversions by Reducing Unnecessary Calls
Some SEO visitors would rather convert on your website, but they end up calling instead. Invoca can help you detect these unnecessary calls and the reasons behind them, so you can increase online conversions from SEO while the burden of reducing unnecessary calls on your business:
- Learn when and why leads call instead of converting online: Use Invoca reports to see the webpages driving lead calls. Review the call summaries and transcripts of those calls to understand why people are calling from specific pages. Is there an issue with your web forms? Are callers asking for answers to the same questions that your website doesn’t address?
- Fix issues causing people to call instead of convert online: Correct these form issues and gaps in your online content to reduce unnecessary calls, increase online conversions, and free agents to assist other callers, reducing hold times and caller abandonment rates.
Verizon uses Invoca to track the number of high-quality phone calls each website page drives. This allows them to determine if certain conversion paths aren’t working efficiently. For example, Verizon can see which online conversion forms prospects are abandoning to place phone calls, instead. They can then update their landing pages to give customers more information, so they can convert online if they choose.
AI Search Engines Are Changing SEO – Invoca Gives You the Data to Adapt and Thrive
If you are a marketer responsible for SEO or website CRO, don’t let AI search engines hurt your performance. Driving more phone call conversions – and analyzing data from those conversations – are the keys to improving SEO results in this new AI world. Request a demo of Invoca to see how you can prove and improve the impact of SEO on your business.
