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January 25, 2022 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

Is Poor Readability Driving People Away From Your Website?

On January 25, 2022 / copywriting, page content, user experience / Leave a Comment

Don't let poor readability put your visitors to sleep — or wose yet, drive them away.How readable is your copy?

You’re probably not a professional writer, so you may be excused for not realizing if your website copy isn’t “readable”. After all, it’s in plain English, right? But readability is more than that. AJ Kohn points out the importance of readability on your website:

Readability is about making your content accessible and comfortable. Never make it a chore. If you make your content difficult to read the value of that content goes down. Lack of readability frustrates comprehension and reduces sharing. This, in turn, limits the social echo of your content and lowers the chances of it obtaining organic links.

Here’s your clue: Heed the warning sign of a high bounce rate.

A high bounce rate represents lost business.If poor readability is driving away visitors on your website, the clue will be a high bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who leave immediately after arriving on a page without looking at anything else on your site.

If you have a bounce problem, you may have a readability problem.

When readability is compromised, you’re also losing valuable visitors who are all potential customers.

Readability is certainly related to the words you use and your sentence structure; that may determine the reading level or grade of your content. But it’s much more than just that. There are things other than your words that can make your content easy to read or difficult to follow.

Here are some important readability factors to consider

People Don’t Read, They Scan

People don't read online: they scan.It’s important to structure your writing to make it easy for people to scan down the page and quickly find the information they need to read carefully. They usually start with developing an understanding of the page layout and navigation and perhaps looking at images.

Noted usability expert Jacob Nielsen conducted a study that found that users “read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.”

Use Font Size Smartly

Headings and subheadings need to be clear. You need a hierarchy of font sizes, and possibly even colors and boldness, to help the reader immediately grasp the structure of your content. I start with a body font size of 16 points in my own blog, and headings & subheadings are clearly larger. Also, think of your headings as representing the structure of your content, much like an outline.

Use Subheadings

Subheadings don’t just visibly demonstrate the structure of your content. They also improve your readability by making your content less dense and, as a result, less intimidating.

Use a Legible Font

Fancy fonts can hurt your readability.
Getting fancy with your fonts can easily become counterproductive.

Avoid infatuation with artistic fonts. Make sure your body text and headings are all legible. Some fonts become difficult to read in bold, and research has shown that some fonts that are easy to read on paper are not as easy to read on a computer screen.

My preference is for serif fonts for printing and sans serif fonts for web content. Simple is better; I recommend fonts like Arial, Humanist, and Century Gothic. I typically use the same font family for headings.  But since headings are larger you may be able to take more leeway there. Here are some font suggestions to consider.

Pay Attention to Line Height

If the lines of text on your screen are too close together, that reduces your readability. A good rule of thumb is to use a line height of about 1.5, but that can vary depending on your choice of font. The goal is to avoid your text looking cramped or looking too spread out.

Watch Your Color Contrast

Poor readability because of insufficient color contrast.
An actual example of poor readability because of insufficient color contrast.

Be cognizant of your text color in comparison to the background color. Inadequate contrast can have a dramatic impact on readability and eye fatigue.

I like black text on a white background, and absolutely hate the popular fashion of using gray text instead of black.  Colored backgrounds are fine, but pay attention to the color of the text to make sure it’s easily readable.

Use Highlights

Don’t be afraid to italicize or bold important words or phrases – or even whole sentences – so that your most important content stands out. If you’re particularly brave, you might decide to use color or highlighting so the importance stuff jumps off the page.

Shorten Your Paragraphs

Nothing is worse than a paragraph that rambles on and on and on. You may be familiar with the expression TL;DR. That stands for Too Long; Didn’t Read. That almost always means the content is too dense and paragraphs are too long. Three or four sentences is about as long as you might want your paragraphs to be.

And don’t be afraid of one-sentence paragraphs either.

Poor readability can cost you customers. Here’s how to fix it.

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Watch Those Long Sentences

Just like a long paragraph, a long sentence compromises readability. If the user has to parse the sentence grammatically to understand it, it’s too long. The Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress discourages too many sentences that are more than about 20 words. I agree. A couple of long sentences spread across the entire page or blog post are okay, but too many of them can drive people away.

Use Pronouns With Care

Avoid pronouns that could force readers to lkook for an antecedent.
Be careful with pronouns in your content.

In a conversation, it’s easy to know what pronouns are referring to. If I talk about that here, the “that” obviously relates to using pronouns. That’s the antecedent. But if the antecedent is in a previous paragraph, and the person scanning through your content alights on the current paragraph, they’ve missed the antecedent. It’s not obvious what the word “that” is referring to.

Repeating nouns instead of referring to them with pronouns may have an added benefit in that nouns are more valuable to the search engines understanding your content than pronouns are. Just try to avoid being “over-redundant”with those nouns.

Preserve Some White Space

Your content – and your readers – need a little space to breathe. Inadequate white space on the page is one of those things that triggers the TL:DR response. Headings and subheadings, bullet lists, and images all help to increase white space on your page.

Avoid Distractions

In general, you want your visitor to read and absorb your content. You may want them to take action, like download something or buy something, or contact you. Don’t break the flow of your user’s concentration on your content. Distractions are a conversion-killer.

Sliders with rotating images, colorful banner ads, and pop-ups that obliterate some of your content are almost always counterproductive. Be particularly careful about pop-ups. Google refers to those as “intrusive interstitials” and they can damage your page experience. That’s important because page experience is a new and increasingly important part of Google’s ranking algorithm.

Images Can Help Readability

Use images to make your text more approachable.
Images can may your content less intimidating and more approachable.

Always use at least one image on every page. I like to insert images with text wrapping around them. They serve many purposes — they can:

Effectively illustrate a point you’re making.

  • Draw the eye to a particular spot on your page.
  • Make your page more memorable.
  • Add a little white space around the image, and white space makes content less intimidating.
  • Make a long paragraph appear less dense.
  • Add color to a mostly black-and-white page.
  • Make your page more approachable which translates into better readability.

Maintain Paragraph Transitions

You don’t want staccato content. Your material needs to flow, to maintain the focus of your reader and ensure comprehension. So try to ensure a natural for progression from paragraph to paragraph by using transition words like ‘and”, “so”, “because”, and even “thus” or “therefore”.

When you maintain that flow, you retain the reader’s attention.

Pay Attention to Your Reading Level

There are a few ways to judge the reading difficulty of your content:

  • How many sentences in the paragraph?
  • What’s the average number of words in a sentence?
  • How many syllables in a word (on average)?

There are a number of tests to determine your reading level. Perhaps the most widely known is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. That test calculates a reading grade level, calibrated for US readers. The Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress evaluates reading level using the Flesch reading ease score.

You can get a reading level score online at a few places:

  • Readable
  • JuicyStudio
  • WebFX Readability Test
  • Readability Analyzer

Don’t Obsess Over Keywords

Keep your keyword phrases in mind, but whatever you do, avoid keyword stuffing in a misguided attempt to get better rankings in Google. Not only is it a readability nightmare, it’s also a red flag to Google that can hurt your visibility rather than help it.

Results

This call to action button encourages purchases.The goal of improving your readability is not just to get your point across. You also want to encourage the reader to do something.

Perhaps you want your reader to subscribe to your newsletter. Maybe you want them to call your office to ask questions or request a consultation. Or perhaps you want them to buy a product.

The goal of your carefully constructed readable content is to entice the reader to move down the sales funnel and take the action you want.

Make sure you include appropriate and compelling calls to action on your page for your reader to take the action you want them to.

Need help with your search visibility? At Rank Magic we’re the SEO experts for small businesses and startups. Reach out for help now.

Find this helpful? If so, please share it with the buttons on the left or the Click To Tweet above.

We welcome your thoughts in the Comments section below.

July 27, 2020 by Bill Treloar 21 Comments

Google’s New Ranking Factor: Page Experience

On July 27, 2020 / copywriting, Google, page content, user experience / 21 Comments

Google to focus on user experience as a ranking factor.Google’s next big algorithm change for Page Experience is planned for launch next year. It will measure user enjoyment of web pages using both old and new specific ranking factors, grouped into a page experience score. Google explains it:

The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.

So what are these page experience factors?

I’ve broken them down into nine discrete thing that a small business owner needs to address on your website.  Let’s hit them one at a time.

Your site needs to be responsive and mobile friendly

A responsive site is one that adapts to the device it’s showing up on. If you open up your site in a browser and change the width of the browser window, the display of the website should respond to that. If you make the browser window narrower, you shouldn’t see it cut off the right edge of paragraphs.

Bring mobile-friendly is no longe an option. Most searches are done from phones now.This is it really obvious on a phone. Your website should look  different on a phone than it does on a desktop computer. But you don’t want to have a separate mobile-only websites like some people did in the early days of the smart phone. You want the same information available on a phone that’s available on a computer, since Google is using a mobile-first index.

If your mobile site is abbreviated and has less content in an effort to more easily fit on a phone, that’s the version of your site Google will index and rank. You want one website that can display differently on a computer and a phone. That way the same information is available regardless of how a customer is looking at it.

Also in terms of being mobile-friendly, it’s important that tap targets, links, buttons and so forth, are large enough and far enough apart to make it easy to tap them. If they’re too close together, your fingers are likely to hit two at once and that provides a poor user experience. The size of your text also may need to be different on a phone so that it’s easy to read.

Get ready for Google’s Page Experience algorithm update.

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Page speed

Page speed is important: all else being equal, a fast page will outrank a slow page.Page speed refers to how many seconds it takes for a page on your website to download into a user’s browser or phone. Google likes to see a web page that displays on your phone or in your computer within 2½  seconds. Fully displaying in 4 seconds is considered adequate, but any longer than that and Google considers it to offer a poor experience.

From a practical matter, we live in an age of impatience. If someone clicks on your listing in search results and drums their fingers while they’re waiting for to load, they may give up before it finishes loading and go back to the Google search results. They are there likely to click on another listing and that “bounce” tells Google that they didn’t like what they found on your site. Not only did you lose a potential customer, but it’s likely to hurt your rankings in the future.

Visual stability

All across the web they are calling this “cumulative layout shift” or CLS. Let your web designer worry about those terms, but don’t  let this jargon intimidate you. What this refers to is things jumping around on your screen as a page loads. It can be very annoying, as you can see on the website Media Bias Fact Check. Google considers this a poor page experience and if it’s happening on your website, your rankings will suffer for it.

[Update March 2021] I’m sure it’s not because of us, but Media Bias Fact Check has corrected their visual stability issue so it’s no longer a good example.

Avoid 404 errors

404-error-page-not-foundWhen a user tries to go to a page that isn’t where they think it is, they get a 404 Page Not Found error. If there are links on your site that point incorrectly to content on you’re website, your shooting yourself in the foot. It’s a poor user experience if you send your users to pages that aren’t there. It’s important to scan your website and make sure you clear up any of those.

Beyond that, though, there may be malformed links on other websites or links on those sites that point to pages you have since eliminated or moved. Those 404 errors are pretty much unavoidable. But you can improve the user experience of them with a custom 404 page. Unlike the default 404 error your browser provides, if you have a custom 404 page it’s formatted just like your website so users know that they haven’t been completely lost. Many websites treat this with a little bit of humor and offer to help the misled user to find what they’re looking for via a search option or a link to your site map.

Get your site ready for Google’s coming Page Experience algorithm update.

Click To Tweet

Security is important

HTTPS padlock icon

Is your website secure? Google is on a mission to improve security across the web, and as a result it tends to give a ranking advantage to secure websites. If your website URL starts with HTTP:// then it’s not secure. Secure websites start with HTTPS:// and insecure websites are flagged when they show up in Chrome. Many people will see the “Not secure” indicator in the address bar of their browser and mistake it to mean that the site is dangerous. You certainly don’t want that for your own website.

If your website is insecure, our blog post from a couple of years ago may help. It’s entitled Make Your Small Business Website Secure with HTTPS.

Avoid intrusive interstitials

Boy, that’s a mouthful. Intrusive interstitials refers to those annoying pop-ups that block most or all of the page content when you arrive on the page. You may have run into them when loading certain websites with an ad blocking plug-in in your browser. Very often they pop up to ask you to subscribe to a newsletter, and so forth. They provide an annoying user interface, and Google doesn’t like them for that very reason.

Not all pop-ups are bad; just those that are intrusive, blocking too much content.

Readability

Writing readable text The Internet expression TL:DR has become popular lately. It means “Too Long: Didn’t Read”. If your web page is too long or too dense and intimidating, people may leave before they digest what you’re trying to say. That doesn’t mean you need to have short pages with little content on them. On the contrary. But you can reduce the density of the page with effective implementation of images and white space.

You also want to avoid sounding pedantic because it takes too much effort on the part of your reader. The Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress has a very valuable feature in that it will assess the readability of your content and offer suggestions to make it more approachable.

Employ clear headings and subheadings

Clear headings and subheadings can go a long way toward making your material less intimidating. Users can scan the page to find the precise portion of the page they are most interested in. Odds are you scanned this page’s headings before deciding to read it. And by employing proper heading tags in the code of your page, you help Google more easily understand your page, and that can only help in your rankings.

Don’t forget CTAs

Include a Call To Action on your page for best reaults.A CTA is a Call to Action and is critical in getting your users to take the action you want them to. If you’ve ever ordered a burger at a fast food joint, the cashier almost certainly asked you “do you want fries with that?” They sell a hell of a lot more fries because they ask.

So if you want someone to call you or to sign up for your newsletter, or to buy something, you need to ask them to do just that. The easiest CTAs to see are buttons, but you can also employ text-only calls to action if that fits your purposes better.

Page experience is important in so many ways

A good page experience will entice more people to read what you have to say, will keep them  engaged and on your page longer, That will reduce your bounce rate and increase your time-on-page, and thus will increase conversions as more people click on your calls to action. Here’s some helpful information about optimizing your conversions rate.

Not only that, but Google will like your page better and rank it higher.
Get ready for Google’s upcoming Page Experience algorithm update by improving the user experience across your website now.

Facing challenges with your page experience? Start a discussion below.

If you found this helpful, please share it with the buttons on the left or the Click-to-Tweet above.

June 22, 2020 by Bill Treloar 2 Comments

The Most Important 60 Characters of Your Content: The Title Tag

On June 22, 2020 / copywriting, keywords, SEO practices / 2 Comments

What’s a Title Tag?

Every page on a website needs a title tag or page title (both terms refer to the same thing. Here’s a quick explanation,) It’s not the visible title or headline on  the page. Instead, it’s in the code of the page. But the page title is visible in three important places:

The headline of your listing in search engines

The page title tag shows up as the headline of your listing in search results.
This is often the very first thing a visitor sees about your website. It’s one of the most important factors in encouraging a user to click on your page.

The tab of your browser


This is most helpful for people who have many tabs open in their browser, making it easier for them to get back to your page. Having keywords for the page near the front is helpful here because your page title’s likely to be truncated.

Social media platforms

The page title shows up as the headline when you share the page in social media.
This is an example of a blog page that’s been shared on Facebook. Notice how prominent the title tag is here.

Page title tags are the most important 60 characters on your web page.

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Writing a good title tag

Your page title tags are very important to your SEO, but they also contribute, positively or negatively, to the user experience of searchers. They should be crafted with care. Here are some rules of thumb to keep in mind.

Length

Avoid truncation if you can. Search engines allocate a finite amount of space to listing headlines. If your page title tag is too long, it will get truncated, possibly hiding important words. I suggest keeping your page titles under 60 characters. The real limit is in pixels, not characters, because some letters (M, W) are wider than others (i, l, t) but the 60 character limit is a good, easy rule of thumb.

Uniqueness

Identical title tags are not as cute as identical dogs.Duplicate content? Not so much.Every page deserves — no, needs — its own unique title tag. Too often I encounter websites that have dozens of pages showing the same page title; often it’s just the company name. When this happens, it not only doesn’t help the page to rank highly in search engines, but also doesn’t compel the searcher to click on it.

Some micro businesses who don’t pay a professional web designer find themselves left with the default page title from the theme that they use. You can spot these sites because page title of their home page is “Home” or some pages on their website have a title tag that reads “New Page”. Let me just ask: how likely are you to click on a page that shows up in the search engines with the headline that simply says “New Page”?

Focus

Focus on your content.To achieve high rankings in Google or elsewhere, your pages must have a clear focus. A services page that lists everything you do or products page that lists everything you sell isn’t really “all about” anything. And the page title of “Services” or “Products” is equally unfocused. It’s unlikely to rank highly in search engines and if it does show up for search it’s unlikely to encourage the searcher to click on it. Every product or service needs its own page with content that’s completely focused on that product or service. Similarly, each page is title tag needs to clearly reflect the focus of the page.

Keyword placement

A good page title with keywords for the page near the front can grab the searcher’s attention immediately and assure them that clicking on your listing will provide information highly relevant to what they’re looking for.  If you feel compelled to include your company name in page titles, it needs to go at the end — with the exception of your Home page where your name is also an important keyword. or the About Us page which is all about you. I typically discourage including your company name in title tags for internal pages because it dilutes the power of the keywords you’ve carefully included in the title tag.

It's okay to use your brand in page titles if it's well known and popular.If you have a well-known brand, see the exception to this rule next.

Your brand or company name

If you have a well-known brand name that’s respected nationally, or even locally, it may be well to ignore the prohibition recommended above. A strong brand name can increase your conversion rates — the likelihood of someone clicking on your listing when it shows up in search results. I would still recommend using it at the end of the page title except for your Home page and perhaps your About page.

Keyword stuffing

I’ve written before about the dangers of keyword stuffing. Since the beginning of search engines, business owners have felt a need to throw as many keyword phrases as they can at search engines so the page will rank for almost any way people search for it. That tactic may have actually worked 20 years ago, but once Google came on the scene it quickly became wise to that trick. Instead of helping, keyword stuffing actually hurts your ranking chances. And if such a page does attract visitors, the user experience of keyword-stuffed copy quickly drives them away.

Similarly, a keyword-stuffed page title is unlikely to attract clicks. What is the value to a searcher of the listing with a headline that says “Best Car Repair, Auto Repair, Car Repair Shop, Local Car Repairs”? Title tags like this are bad for searchers and are very likely to hurt your rankings. Search engines understand variations of keywords and common synonyms (car, auto) and would consider a title like this to provide a poor user experience, making it counterproductive.

Spend a little more time on your title tags

When creating a new web page or blog post, it’s tempting to write your page title and then create your content. Once you finish the content, you’re eager to publish it and get it out there. That’s when you should stop and take a breath. Revisit the title tag and make sure it still clearly identifies what your page is about. Think about it with the above rules of thumb in mind before you finalize and publish your content. A little extra thought and care can make a big difference in how many people choose to read your material.

Want to dig a little deeper? Online marketing agency Distilled has an in-depth article on how to make your title tags the best they can be.

Update September 1, 2020 — Moz has an excellent new blog post that’s very germane to this discussion: Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate

Update September 2021 — SEO Owl has a nifty little tool to see if Google is truncating — or even completely rewriting — your title tags before they appear in search results. Check out the Google Title Rewrite Checker.

Facing challenges with your own page title tags? Start a discussion below.

Find this helpful? If so, please share it with the buttons on the left or the Click-to-Tweet above.

If you’re struggling with your online visibility, call Rank Magic: we’re experts in that.

April 29, 2020 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

How to Use Keywords to Get Your Blog Found and Read

On April 29, 2020 / blogs, copywriting, keywords / Leave a Comment

You do have a blog, don’t you?

Write your blog around keywordsWe always recommend that our clients host a blog on their own website. Google loves fresh content, and a blog is the perfect place to add new content on a continuing basis. Blogs are perfect for answering long-tail keyword searches. Keywords are the search phrases people type or speak into a search engine. Long tail keyword searches are typically at least four or five words and are thus quite specific. They are also easier to rank for than broader keywords.

Start with keyword research

People search for answers to their questions in search engines.You want to base your blog posts around keyword phrases that represent questions your customers or potential customers are likely to be asking. Blog posts that introduce a totally new idea are unlikely to show up in search because very few people will know to be searching about that. But if your blog answers a question that lots of people have, it’s more likely people will be searching for it.
That doesn’t mean you can’t introduce new subjects in your blog, just that those posts are unlikely to bring in readers from Google or other search engines. Those posts will need to be promulgated through things like your email newsletter, your Facebook page, or other social media.

How does a small business do keyword research?

Start with keyword research for your blog.If you’re one of our clients, we’ll do the hard work for you. But if you’re not, that doesn’t mean it’s out of reach. One place a lot of people use is the Google Keyword Planner. It’s actually designed for Google Ads, but doesn’t have to be limited to that. You can also search for a good keyword planning tool. In tools like this you can enter sample keyword phrases and see what related phrases are searched for frequently.
Be careful to avoid using keyword phrases that are jargon — terms that are common to you but may not be common to your target market. Google used to have a rule to help identify potential keywords; they called it “Ask 10 Taxi Drivers”. What that means is to ask a number of people who might become customers or clients but who are not in your line of work. They’re likely to use terms you wouldn’t think of because they’re not as close to your business terminology as you are. What questions do they have? Are those questions lots of people might ask? If so, those are good questions to build a blog post around.

Check the search volume

Your keyword research should indicate roughly how many times a month each variation on your keyword phrase is searched. You don’t automatically want to pick the one that is searched most frequently. That’s because you need to balance that with relevance to your customers and your business. A good keyword phrase is searched often enough to make it worthwhile and is also focused enough to be of interest to your target market.

How to use keywords to get your blog found and read

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Use your keyword in your blog post

Use keywords in your content, but carefully.If your keyword phrases a question, it might make an excellent headline for your blog post. You might also want to use it in the title tag and/or the description tag of your blog post.
Long gone are the days when the key to showing up for a search phrase was to repeat that search phrase multiple times throughout your blog post. Don’t do that; Google abhors keyword stuffing. Instead, use variations on the keyword and linguistically related terms. For example if your post is about how to pick the best running shoe, you might explain the difference between running shoes and sneakers or jogging shoes.
Make sure your primary focus is on answering the question. Chances are you will almost automatically use related terms that will help Google understand how related your blog post is to that question.

Check out your competition and be better

Answer the question better for more traffic.Take a look at other material online that tries to answer your question or is all about your chosen keyword phrase. See how you can answer the question better or more thoroughly. See what they didn’t explain well, and do a better job than they did. See what they left out and include it.
Google is getting better and better at identifying the best answer for a question. Make sure it’s yours.

Comments start a conversation and can increase conversions.Allow comments

If people can comment or ask questions at the bottom of your blog post, you can engage with them and leverage the value of your blog post in terms of converting readers into customers.

Promote your blog post

Share your blog post where you think it will find interest. I like to promote every new blog post I write on social media and in my email newsletter. It’s always helpful to jump start visibility of your content.

Questions? Share them in the comments below.

If you found this helpful, please consider sharing it with the “click to Tweet” above or the share buttons on the left.

January 20, 2019 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

Your Website Needs Calls to Action!

On January 20, 2019 / copywriting, page content, user experience, web design / 1 Comment

This Buy Now button is a clear call to action.

Not having calls to action (CTAs) is one of the ten most common SEO mistakes small business owners make.

What’s a Call to Action?

An Add To Cart call to action buton is essential on any product or service "Buy" pageA CTA is a direction that asks or tells your reader to do something. It’s an image or line of text that prompts your reader to take an action, like download, buy, learn, request, sign up, subscribe, join, phone, ask, get help …

Why are CTAs important?

If you want people to comment on your blog posts, you nered to encourage that with a callo to action button like this one.

Do you want more orders? More inquiries from potential customers? How about more readers for your blog? More social shares? None of that is likely to happen without good calls to action.

If you’ve ever ordered a fast food burger, you were almost certainly asked “Do you want fries with that?” That’s a call to action, and it sells a lot more fries than if they don’t ask.

This call to action button for downloading something is more effective with nearby text extolling the valkue of the download.

It’s a very important part of getting your website visitors to convert into customers, and it’s often overlooked in writing website content. A call to action can determine whether or not a visitor on your website does what you want them to.

Small Business Trends claims that 70% of small business websites lack a call to action.

And customers actually expect them. When they get to a breaking point in a page or reach the bottom, they often look for direction to help them move on to the next step – whatever that is.

How to create and use Calls to Action

There are a few guidelines for effective use of CTAs. Here are what I consider to be the most important of them.

  • Almost all of your marketing content needs calls to action:
    • brochures
    • emails
    • blog posts
    • web pages
    • coupons
    • print ads
  • Get more subscribers with a CTA like this.Make them brief. Occasionally for SEO purposes, a call to action may be longer for the sake of including keywords, but in general they tend to work better if they’re brief.
  • Make them clear – ambiguous CTAs don’t work.
  • Demonstrate a benefit. Give your readers a reason to take the action you want them to take.
  • It never hurts to emphasize that something is FREE!
  • Use strong action verbs:
    • Download
    • Buy
    • Sign up
    • Subscribe
    • Join
    • Get Started
    • Call Now
    • Ask Us
    • Get Help
  • Wherever possible, avoid weak directions like “click here” or “learn more”.
  • Make your CTA as specific as possible:
    • Download my E- book
    • Call to talk with us
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  • Make your call to action stand out visually on the page.
  • The best locations are at the end of a blog post or web page, in between separate topics on a page, in a side panel, or in a pop-up or slide-in.
Get more sales with effective Calls to Action (CTAs) on your website.
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Some in-depth reading

The Daily Egg has a nice article on examples that work.

Neil Patel suggests avoiding CTAs like Sign up — Buy now — Learn more. He offers some detailed advice on how to write calls to action that are more likely to convert visitors to customers.

And here are a few CTA’s of our own:

We welcome your opinion. Join the conversation in the Comments below!

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Need more traffic so more customers can see and respond to your Calls to Action? Rank Magic can help! Ask me how.

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