The call to action

I’m noticing a real obsession in the marketplace right now with making sure one’s website gets top billing in search results. This is hardly surprising given the size of the search market (some 11 billion searches conducted in August this year in the US alone). In other words, the potential exposure a number one ranking can give you can be worth a tidy sum to the bottom line.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that a high ranking in search engines isn’t important when clearly it is (in fact, saying otherwise would run counter to my previous post on tips to improve your website’s ranking). What concerns me, however, is the number of businesses that, in their obsession to maintain a high ranking, do so at the cost of improving their website.

The vast majority of websites I review through my work here at Austrade typically fail on one of the most important elements of any website – ie. the call to action.

A ‘call to action’ is what you want someone to do after they’ve read your content. The most common call to actions are ‘contact us’ or ‘click here’ to purchase. However, businesses shouldn’t be limited to these alone.

When casting a critical eye over your website, consider what your end objective is for the user. Is it to get them to contact you? Is it to get them to purchase something? Or do you want them to download a sales brochure or some other additional information?

You need to identify what your end goal is for the users of your website so that you can clearly tell them how to get there. Remember: if a user is on your website, it’s likely they’re trying to solve a problem. You need to provide the solution.

So, for example, when dealing with a client face-to-face, you go through a sales pitch. This might involve introducing yourself, outlining your offering, building confidence in your offering, and then closing the deal or transaction. How are you doing this online?

A call to action can help guide the user through your website and, in turn, through your sales pitch. Rule of thumb suggests you should have a call to action on every webpage. In my web travels, I’ve seen as many as six plus calls to action on an ‘About Us’ webpage (see example here) and none of them were out of place.

The call to action is especially important since, if you have visitors to your website, you already have a captured audience. Equally so, engaging with a search engine optimisation (SEO) program, you’re hopefully going to achieve a higher ranking for your website and, thus, attract more visitors to it. The question common to both scenarios is: how are you going to service these visitors/customers?

If you don’t have call to actions strategically placed around your website, it could become confusing for the user. The problem with that is it’s all too easy for them to hit the ‘back’ button and go to the number two website in their search results.