Support Your SEO Campaign with Effective Calls to Action

Your duties in your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign do not end after launching your website, providing significant content and building links. Remember, search engine spiders may have visited, indexed and ranked your site better, and searchers may have finally clicked your URL and read your content but all these cannot indicate success – at least not yet. This is because you are still left with one more important task to perform: give them clear directions.

Do not let your site visitors make their own decision. As much as you can, you have to establish an influence on them. So instead of waiting for their next action, tell them directly what to do: read more information about your products or services, subscribe to your email updates and to make a purchase among others. Generally, this is how an effective call to action should work—and this is what your website should include. If you have no idea about calls to action and which are the effective ones to use, read the guide below:

1. Do Not Hang Your Sentences

You may think that nothing is wrong with your sentences because they are complete. But as an Internet marketer, you should know that “Call us today” is not as good as “Call us today to know more about how you can be rich through the Internet”. In fact, the latter sentence is more persuasive. The same goes for “Click here” button. Why settle on that when you can opt for “Your dream of having a sexy body is just a click away”.

In general, try to be as clear as possible, and finish your thoughts. Don’t be lazy, and know that this is not a viable stylistic choice. As you’ll see below, we do advise you use strong, direct language, but there needs to be something behind it, some kind of pull.

2. Make It Straight and Convincing

Do not go around the bush. Tell them what to do, like buying your products – but make it more convincing. Using “Buy here” as a call to action is straight to the point but too simple. Write “Buy the recipe book today and make your husband appreciate you more”.

Make it convincing, use imperative, dominant language. Get straight to the point, let it be known exactly what you want from your audience, and what you want them to do. Find the difference between “You can now download our brochure” vs. “Download our brochure here and now”.

3. Use Catchy Phrases

Wordings really work wonders when getting the huge interest of your target market. Instead of “Read reviews from our present and previous clients” to let them know about how many people have appreciated your service and how they have become successful because of your business, say “Check how we can help you sign those big fat checks”.

By letting them know, at least indirectly, that you already have satisfied clients and customers, you gain a bit of their trust. Consciously or subconsciously, they will trust your company and website more if they believe they’re not the first ones that are getting services.

4. Offer Freebies or Discounts at the End of the Call to Action

Site visitors may be more encouraged to click the link if you will offer them something, like “Enroll for a driving class today and get 10% discount”. You see, people are more eager to do something if they know that will get something from it.

Hand out small goodies, a free class, a small sample of your work, or a one-on-one meeting over Skype. Offer something, don’t just let them leave empty-handed. Give them a reason to act fast and to download or get what you have to offer.

5. Have a Secondary Call to Action if You Find It Necessary

In as much as you want the prospective clients to click the “Buy now” button, you still have to give them the benefit of the doubt sometimes. Make sure, however, that the outcome will be the same: They purchase your products. For instance, near the “Buy now” button, place “Reasons why you need it”. They may not have clicked the primary button and instead opted for the secondary call to action, they are not yet out of your convincing power because the second button presents more influential information that will lead them to click the first one.

6. Use Emotional Language

You want to get your audience enthusiastic about what you’re offering. Let your call to action be energetic, let it show some optimism and excitement. Adding exclamation points sparingly is an excellent way to do this. Note however how we said “sparingly”. Having every other sentence of yours be followed by an exclamation point will make your content seem cartoonish and salesy. There is a fine line between conveying optimism and excitement, and sounding like a two-bit car salesman.

And of course, the language itself should have certain commanding elements, like “buy now”, or some adjectives. Of course, stuffing your paragraphs with too many adjectives will just cheapen up your writing if you don’t have the proper features to back up what you say. But at the same time, no need to be sparse, you’re not Hemingway, and there is no need to act like you are.

7. Creativity Can Get You a Long Way

Just because you’re setting up an SEO campaign doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be creative. Quite the opposite really, it can help you. Now, of course, we’re not talking about making a huge, wide-spanning fable encompassing your content just to give you a nice call to action. What we are however saying is that you should perhaps think about making your call to action unique. So, instead of just saying “check out our blog now”, we suggest “quality information is just a click away”. Nothing fancy or too complex, just a simple floral phrase.

8. Get Some Numbers in There

People respond rather well to numbers, to pricing, discounts, promotions… Essentially, the numbers kind of give a clear and unambiguous value to everything. Giving out clear percentage numbers, clear options, users, all of this may attract them to make a choice. By putting stats and numbers into your content, you will seem more serious. It will show that you have done your research properly. So, try to include this into your calls to action. It can give them that extra push. For example “Click now and be one of the 4000 thousand happy users this month…”

Calls to action, as the term suggests, ask site visitors to act to something. In Internet marketing, this simply means translating visitors into clients through the use of powerful words or phrases. For this reason, website owners must see to it that they make use of effective calls to action. The guidelines above can be considered.

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