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?
A 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?
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.
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
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
- Sign up for our email newsletter
- Ask us a question
- 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.
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.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:
SEO Mistakes Are Easy
It’s very common for small business owners to recognize very early on that a website is indispensable to their business. They will often spend a great deal of time and effort in creating a website that is robust, full-featured, attractive, and even sexy. Often it will include a blog with months or years of laboriously crafted information.
Your audience is people: current and future customers or clients. But out of zeal to achieve high visibility in Google, many small business owners focus on Google instead of on their customers.
Customers don’t care what the features are; they care about what it will do for them. To get customer to buy from you or patronize your services, you need to explain what’s in it for them. 
It’s natural to want to focus your SEO on search phrases that people search for a great deal. Optimizing for a phrase that people search for hundreds of thousands of times a month instead of phrases that people search for 20 or 30 times a month. The problem with that is that such keyword phrases are usually way too competitive for a small business to compete with.
Too often small business owners want to keep their pages short and “punchy”. You may recognize that people don’t have the patience to read a great deal of content. The Internet expression TL:DR has become popular lately. It means “Too Long: Didn’t Read”.
This is a critical error I see a lot. In order to present the website from growing too large, a business will include a page titled Services. On that page they may have a bulleted list of all the different things that they do, possibly with a sentence or two of description about each of them.
This is understandable. As a small business owner, you probably know little about 
Your search rankings are going to bounce around a bit, and that’s inevitable. But if you’re not paying attention to them, and your rankings begin to slide, you may not notice it in your revenue numbers until much later. 
This brand is all about showing love to US made products. It knows that its target audience is searching for workout clothes. But it goes further. It sells itself as being exciting. The outcome? You’ll look so good in these clothes that “you’ll wear them all the time.” It’s just a shame that the number of brands in the title and meta don’t match.
Your 
There are a number of top tips to writing a CTA that will give you a great meta description:
I often explain that despite the “Magic” in our company name, SEO isn’t magic, and there really should be no secrets about how it works. Nevertheless, it does require a little shift in how you think about your website to understand what works and why. Small business SEO mistakes can be pretty easily avoided if you know what they are.
Just about anything you do on a website specifically for Google, is likely to fail to address the needs of your customers. As Google has improved over the years, it’s gotten very smart about identifying websites that are helpful to users as opposed to being focused just on Google. It’s important to bear in mind that the user experience on a website is a ranking factor at Google.
You need to know if your efforts are working or not. If they’re not helping, you know you need to change things. How are your search rankings doing over time? How much traffic are you getting from search? Is it improving? You need to know this. Rank Magic provides extensive reporting to our clients on the essential things they need to know but if you’re not a client of ours you should take steps to track results yourself.
