Dominate Your Local Market!

8. No call to action

What do you want your website visitor to do? Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But very few web pages out there have a clear “call to action.” Without a clear call to action, the visitor is left wondering what to do next. Most often, they’ll just leave.

When they leave, they might not find their way back and you’ve lost a potential customer. You’ll find a “call to action” down lower on this page. If you take the action called for, you’ll know whether your website has a clear call to action. That action is there to illustrate exactly what I mean when I say a clear call.

Tempting though it may be, don’t ever have more than one “call to action” on a page. Visitors will find that confusing (which do I do first?) and probably leave without taking any action at all.

If you are going to have a call to action on every page – and you should – it could take many forms.

You may want your visitors to:

• Sign up for your email list
• Request product or service information
• Visit your place of business
• Buy a product or service right now

Each of those requires a unique approach:

• Sign up for an email list – You may want to use a special squeeze page (a highly effective tactic), or you may use a drop-down box, or lightbox-type overlay. Some of these can be somewhat annoying, but they are also very effective.
• Request product or service information – Here you might want to provide them with a form they can fill in and have the info mailed to them. Exercise a little caution here as most folks don’t like giving too much information on a first visit. Better to get as little info as possible to start and ask for more as you build a relationship.
• Visit your place of business – Make sure they have the address, a phone number, your business hours and a map. Don’t leave anything to chance. Offer an incentive for visiting.
• Buy a product or service right now – If you want to sell off a web page right away, you need a compelling sales letter that lays out the benefits of your product. Don’t confuse features with benefits. A feature is a characteristic of the product that produces a benefit. Example: an air conditioner is a feature of a car. That feature provides the benefit that you can drive cool and comfortable in the hottest weather.

Mention your product’s features, but sell on your products benefits.

The “Call to Action”

Here’s what I’d like you to do. Try this with your home page first. Ask someone to go to your home page and look it over. Then ask them what the page wants them to do next.

If they don’t give you the correct answer immediately, call us and we’ll help you straighten the problem out. If there is no correct answer, call right this minute, even if it’s 3 in the morning and leave a message.

If your visitors don’t have a clear idea of their next step, you are wasting money. If you’re wasting money, let’s turn that around today. Call Bob at 859.544.9005 right now.

Related posts:

1. 10 Common Local Business SEO Mistakes Search Engine Optimization, a.k.a. SEO, is one of the most...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.