The Importance of Call Tracking When Advertising Online
SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is an effective way that marketers are able to curate their sites to appeal to those who visit them. It is not uncommon for marketers to measure their level of success through this type of effort. If someone who is editing a site notices that the SEO they implemented is not working very well, they will often only concentrate on fixing that until it works.
This can lead to them concentrating too much on only one thing. Other means that marketers use to gather their online data include performing analytics tests and gathering their data that way, monitoring page views on their sites or pages, and achieving goal conversions. While these are all key components that can help to make up a businesses’ overall success, they are not the end-all, be-all, of all marketing plans in existence. The internet has its uses, but the phone is still being used by most of your customers to perform business tasks.
Call tracking is highly underestimated for its value in marketing, often overlooked due to the fact that not everyone understands how it works or even what to do with the data that they have gathered from their efforts. The truth is that this is just as valid and valuable of a resource for creating and sustaining leads and monitoring inquiries as all of the other aforementioned details. Even though we spend a large portion of our day browsing the internet or doing business via the internet, many people still have to speak over the phone for their business and for other purposes as well.
By having customers pick up the phone and physically call your business, you can introduce a whole new type of lead. One that is more personable and thus more desired by individuals. How many times have you heard a potential customer complain about such-and-such business only having an automated phone service and never being able to speak to a real person anymore? Even if you do have an automated service set up, having the option for customers to be forwarded somehow to a real person in certain situations is beneficial to both providing more satisfied customers through quality customer service and potential new leads that you can gather data on, depending on their behaviors during calls.
Before recent technological advances were made, it was very difficult to be able to determine exactly where inquiries made to your business via phone call were coming from. Until recent years, this led to a lot of business owners and their marketers not knowing how effective their marketing was, since it was leaving out a big chunk of their customer base’s data. Some companies would rely on surveys for people to take after the call, in order to gauge where they were calling from. Those methods were unreliable and spotty at best.
Now there exists top of the line call tracking software, which will allow you to know more about your marketing stats and whether or not your efforts are being made in vain in certain areas, versus others. By knowing where someone is calling in from, you can effectively minimize unnecessary costs by concentrated on locations where you are getting the most attention to your business. The benefits are aplenty with call tracking and it’s just one more expert way to obtain invaluable data that can improve the way you do business.
Basics of Search Marketing
One of the most essential aspects of a successful website is the use of search marketing. If you own a website, the biggest way you are going to get traffic to your site is through search engine results. When someone uses a search engine, they are likely going to click on one of the first few websites that appear after conducting a search.
If you want people to visit your site, you are going to have to figure out a way to appear on the first page of search results. The higher your website ranks on these search engines, the greater number of people are going to visit your page. The more visitors to your page, the higher revenue your website can generate. You will most likely have low traffic to your page if you have not optimized the search marketing strategy for your website.
Search marketing involves two key properties. Search engine optimization is a technique that involves embedding keywords into a website, which should lead to your page appearing on the first page of search results for that term. If you are successfully able to do this, a lot of people are going to organically find and visit your website.
This should be the goal of everyone who owns a website. If you are serious about driving as much traffic as possible to your page, you should do everything in your power to increase your search engine optimization. While search engine optimization is amazing for driving traffic to a page, there is no question that perfecting SEO can be a difficult endeavor. The algorithm that Google uses is constantly changing. The evolving algorithm that these search engines utilize can make it very difficult to be successful over a long period of time.
One of the best ways to ensure your website gets traffic is through PPC advertising. Pay per click advertising is a marketing strategy that websites use to obtain traffic through strategic advertisements. Your ad will appear on various websites, which will inevitably lead to people clicking on the link. Every time a link is clicked on, you will have to pay a fee to whichever company you are working with.
It can be quite difficult for some website owners to justify this type of investment, but the cost associated with this technique is very much worth it. The more exposure your website gets, the better the chance it is going to grow over time. If someone visits your site through this type of marketing campaign, there is a good chance they are going to come back at a later date. You have a chance to make money every single time a person visits your site.
While it is extremely difficult in certain cases to perfect search engine optimization, it is fairly easy to drive traffic to a site with PPC. Due to the ease of obtaining traffic with this strategy, it is generally a great idea to utilize PPC advertising while trying to build up a site from the ground.
The Glory of Arlington County
To help illustrate the great opportunity we have at our disposal, we wanted to take a moment to highlight the rich history of Arlington County.
The History of Arlington, Virginia
Arlington, Virginia, is a county located in Northern Virginia across the Potomac River. In the U.S., Arlington is the smallest self-governing county with a geographical land mass of 26 square miles. With a population of 230,050 by the end of 2016, the county does not have any incorporated towns within it. It also forms the sixth-largest county in Virginia. It is currently the fifth-highest income county by median family income in the USA. Arlington is home to the Pentagon, the Arlington National Cemetery, and Reagan National Airport.
Colonial Virginia
Arlington County initially belonged to the Colony of Virginia as a part of Fairfax County. Fairfax County borrows its name from the sixth Lord Fairfax of Cameron, Thomas Fairfax. The county borrows its current name from the family residence of Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, and its plantation located along the Potomac River. The property was renamed the Arlington National Cemetery before it lent its name to the county.
Alexandria County
Back in the day, present-day Arlington was known as Alexandria, and together with part of the City of Alexandria, formed the larger Alexandria County in the District of Columbia. Virginia ceded the area of present-day Arlington to the new U.S. federal government. In 1790, the Residence Act was passed, and the president took this opportunity to shift the borders of the federal territory to the southeast to include the District’s southern tip, and the existing city of Alexandria.
In 1791, Congress amended the Residence Act approving the new site. However, the act prohibited the erection of public buildings in the region apart from on the Maryland side along the Potomac River. In 1801, Congress approved the Organic Act of 1801 placing the entire federal territory in the District of Columbia. The unincorporated region consisted of present-day Arlington and part of the present-day independent City of Alexandria. This meant that the residents of Arlington were no longer residents of either Virginia or Maryland, with no representation in Congress.
Retrocession
Historical occurrences including the economic neglect of Alexandria by Congress, the lack of voting rights for the residents in the District, and divisions over slavery prompted led to a movement by residents requesting the return of Alexandria back to Virginia. They petitioned Congress between 1840 and 1846 to approve the retrocession, which was allowed pursuant to a referendum which was held in September 1846. The residents voted for the retrocession, and the Virginia General Assembly formally accepted the legislation in March 1847. The Virginia legislature incorporated a part of Alexandria into the City of Alexandria in 1852.
Civil War
Voters in Alexandria County approved secession from the Confederate Union during the American Civil war in a referendum held in May 1861. In 1864, the federal government confiscated Abingdon estate during the war because the owner did not pay the estate tax in person during his time in the Confederate Army. The property was then sold and leased to a third party. At the end of the war in 1865, the heir of the estate started legal action and recovered the property. Later, the property was appraised, but the current owner failed to pay estate property tax in person once again leading to confiscation of the property by the Federal government. The property was converted to a military cemetery. Once again, another heir to the property initiated legal action for recovery of the property and won against the federal government. The U.S. Congress legally bought the property from the owner for its market value in 1883, eventually forming the Arlington National Cemetery. The Arlington House found within the cemetery is today administered by the National Park Service.
Separation from Alexandria
In 1870, Alexandria County legally separated from the City of Alexandria following an amendment to Virginia’s Constitution stating all incorporated cities should be independent of the counties they were initially a part of. Following the arising confusion caused by the shared name between the county and the city, a movement was formed to rename Alexandria County.
20thCentury
Arlington County adopted its new name in 1920.In the 1930s, the present location of the Pentagon, Hoover Field, was established. Apartment communities such as Buckingham and Colonial Village were opened in the same decade. In 1949, the Northern Virginia University Center was formed. Other universities soon followed suit. In 1959, racial desegregation in Arlington County Schools was stopped following the admission of black students to now H-B Woodlawn, formerly Stratford Junior High School.
21stCentury
On September 11, 2011, al-Qaeda terrorists crashed a plane into the Pentagon killing 115 people.
Nestle USA and Amazon.com made the county home to their headquarters in 2017 and 2018 respectively.
New and Improved
Consider this your backup source of information for all things Arlington Virginia Chamber of Commerce related details. This will be a compilation of the best business guidance we have at our disposal. Our job with the Chamber as it has always been is to bring top quality resources to every entrepreneur in our reach. To that end we will never change. However change is necessary. So we are here to announce our new and improved mission statement.
Arlington County residents stand with their local businesses and associations. For which we will continue to provide correspondingly.