Calls to Action (CTAs) – convert website visitors into clients
Calls to Action (CTAs) – convert website visitors into clients
March 27, 2018 by Emma P
What is a CTA?
The most important key to converting website visitors into clients is to have what marketers call a “strong call to action”. A CTA, in essence, is exactly what it says it is: a tool calling people to action. Usually in the form of a button or a link, CTAs are used to convert visitors into clients, prompting them to take a specific action. The goal is to establish a connection with interested website visitors. It may be as simple as the visitors giving you their email address and permission to communicate with them.
People are on your website, viewing your company information, and they are looking for clues as to what they are supposed to do next. A strong call to action is a clear, simple and compelling offer that persuades them to take the action you want. It is the most important part of your online advertising.
Where to use CTA ?
Once you have potential clients to your website it is important to keep them for a short while as studies show that websites that are not attractive and difficult to navigate will turn clients away quickly and they will look elsewhere. It is also very important that your website clearly sets out the services that you are offering your clients.
If you make sure that the visitors can contact you in some way, you are surely to convert them into clients. Where to use the CTA? On your website, on your blog or even in your emails.
What can be a CTA ?
In terms of your website a call to action (CTA) is an image, text or advertisement that tells potential clients to contact you about a product or service that you offer. It is a very useful and critical part of your advertising. You must have a call to action on every page of your website. This may include a phone number, email address and a contact form or a call back request form (if the potential client would like to be contacted out of office times).
Other types of call to action that you may consider are signing up for a newsletter, offering a free download, quote or discount or may telling them why they would be better off using your service rather than another service.
Other important factors we look at when designing web sites is the demographics of the clients who will be using your website, the language used in the call to action and the placing of the call to action.
Here are some tips on creating a strong call to action:
- Keep it simple. Use fewer words and make the offer clear without conditions or special rules. If the call to action is confusing, people will not take action. Make sure the offer is clear and concise. Visitors have short attention spans and need to know exactly what to do next. The action should also take very little effort on the part of the visitor to complete the process. The harder it is to complete, the fewer people who will complete it.
- Make it obvious. Don’t put your call to action at the bottom of the page. Make it clear, upfront and maybe with bright colours. The obvious your offer is, the more people would click on it and turn into your clients.
- Make it valuable. You need to make the offer appealing and valuable to your target audience. One way to do this is by adding a gift or just by giving useful information that is targeted to your audience (and therefore will attract them). This does not necessarily imply that your offer needs to be expensive or time consuming to create. Often, you can re-purpose existing useful materials your company is already using or has created for other purposes such as case studies, sales sheets or brochures on your services and products, articles, “how to” guides, etc. Your offer should be tailor-made to suit the types of customers that you want to attract.
- Use action verbs. Clicking your CTA button should lead your visitors to believe they’re already taking positive action to achieve their objective. Here are some high-converting CTAs that use trigger words (words and phrases that trigger a user into clicking): get my free quote, join now, create my free account, go to checkout, get instant access and many more.
- Create a sense of urgency. If you want to boost your conversions this is effective because people naturally want what they can’t have. Words like “act now” or “for a limited time” can be all it takes to motivate a potential customer to click your link. It is simple supply and demand: as the availability of something decreases, demand increases (e.g. promotions which expire in a limited time).
Finally, remember to test. Every business is different. By constantly measuring and analysing, you can determine what works best for your audience and goals, leading to a CTA strategy that converts every time.
Google Updates SEO Starter Guide
Google announced that the old version of the SEO Starter Guide released in 2008 will be replaced by the new, updated SEO Starter Guide to help marketers and webmasters create search-engine friendly websites.
Abhas Tripathi, search quality strategist at Google, said that the updated SEO Starter Guide will replace both the old Starter Guide and the Webmaster Academy, which supports information and tools to teach webmasters how to create a site and have it found in Google Search.
“The updated version builds on top of the previously available document and has additional sections on the need for search engine optimisation, adding structured data markup and building mobile-friendly websites” he added.
Google SEO Starter Guide outlines the best practices that will hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content. Here is a brief description of SEO Starter Guide, giving you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website:
- Help Google (and users) understand your content - let Google see your page the same way a user does (create unique, accurate page titles but descriptive at the same time; use heading tags to emphasise important text; add structured data markup in order to describe your content to search engines). This way you can attract just the right kind of customers for your business.
- Manage your appearance in Google Search Results – understand how search engines use URLs to be able to crawl and index the content and to refer users to it; the navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they need; plan your navigation based on your homepage (consider the “root” page as the starting point for the other pages of your website containing more specific information); also try and make it simple for the visitor to navigate around the pages of the website, creating a naturally flowing hierarchy and maybe including a simple navigational page for your entire site; also try to create your URL as simple as possible for Google to find.
- Optimise your content – creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any other factors. Users like good content when they see it and they will direct other users to it (it can be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums or other means). Word-of-mouth is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, but it needs a quality content. (easy-to-read text, clear topics, fresh and unique content, always optimise your content for your users, not search engines).
- Make your site mobile-friendly – As the world is mobile today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device, therefore your website should be mobile ready for the online presence.
- Promote your website – Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject (know about social media sites - sites built around user interaction and sharing have made it easier to match interested groups of people up with relevant content; reach out to those in your site’s related community because it is usually very beneficial, and it could spark new ideas for content).
- Analyse your search performance and user behaviour – Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters to analyse their performance in their search engine (e.g. Search Console); if you’ve improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Search Console or other services, you're probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this.
If you really want to improve your search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend reading this guide front-to-back. There are also lots of linked-to resources that are worthy of your attention.
Each section of this guide is important to understanding the most effective practices of search engine optimisation.
Get in touch with us if you’d like to talk more about SEO for your organisation or about how we can help you build your next digital experience.
Why SEO is Important for Businesses
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) consists of multiple strategies, actions and best practices, all of which have the end goal of improving your website’s position in search engines.
SEO is Google’s way of determining which sites deserve to rank highly for each query entered into its search engine.
SEO is important and it’s something that you can control. You can improve your rankings meaning you can control how many visitors visit your website. That leads to how many sales or leads you get, which impacts the amount of money you can make from being online.
There are two kinds of SEO: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO consists of anything you can control on your own website to improve your rankings (like site speed, keyword presence, header text) and off-page SEO which is about anything done on other websites that may influence your rankings (links).
So why is SEO so important?
- Because you want to provide visitors to your website a great user experience that they will tell others
- Because you want to provide search engines like Google critical information that will place your website in the top 5 spots on the returns page
If you are not engaging in Search Engine Optimisation, you are not going to be on that first page of results. You need to stay competitive, giving your brand name exposure, gaining new customers.
SEO is about having a relevant and meaningful website content, including the right keywords, getting attention of the search engines, also keep it short and simple but exciting enough for users to want to click on your site.
Studies have shown that SEO can provide a business visibility, branding, web traffic, credibility and insight into customer behaviour. For example, if two websites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimised website is more likely to have more customers and even conversions (sales).
Search Engine Optimisation is also good for the social promotion of your website. Customers who will find your website on the search engines are more likely to promote you on social media as well. And again, you may gain more clients and your name is seen.
In short, SEO is a set of rules that can be followed by website owners to optimise their websites for search engines and, in this way, improving their search engine rankings.
It is important for any kind of business, small or large and is a crucial factor for your online success. And don’t forget: updating your site often is very important!
If you need any advice on how to improve your rankings or to use our SEO services, please get in touch. Our team at Phaeria will be happy to help!
Does the speed of your Company Website matter for users in Southport?
The speed of your Company website is an important factor that determines how well your website ranks on search engines such as Google and it’s becoming more and more important for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Without any doubt, page load speed can have a huge impact on a website’s user experience and conversion rate as well. More and more users are now shifting towards using mobile devices as their main form of computer and that means that your website not only needs to be responsive but it also needs to load fast too. According to recent data, up to 40% of consumers will leave a webpage if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load and up to 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with a website’s performance are less likely to buy from them again.
But just as important is that having a fast loading company website increases your customers experience and will encourage them to read more information from your website. In the end, they are more likely to contact your company or buy products from you then if they deal with a slow loading site.
Also, if your website is slow to load it will not be as effective and will result in a slower crawling rate from Google when indexing pages and other content and the new posts will take longer to show up in search results. Making your website load faster and therefore to be read quicker will increase your organic traffic and also your ranking on search engines such as Google or Bing.
So, the short answer to this question is definitely yes because users are impatient and speed matters a lot. People like fast sites.
At Phaeria one of our priorities is to ensure that all our sites are optimised to load fast. We use the best servers, latest technologies and much more to make sure that the businesses we work with get these advantages from working with us.
If you would like to know more about how we optimise our websites to load faster and increase ranking on Google, please get in touch.
