Sir, Your CTA is DOA.
A CTA is a bad thing to mess up. Mess up your CTA, and you won’t be getting the best results possible from your marketing efforts. What’s a “CTA”, you may ask? In short, it’s your “Call To Action” – the instruction given to your audience for the action you would like for them to take.
In this video, Greg Mate, our SEA Trainer in Montreal, explains the importance of a good CTA and how to present it in a way that will maximize the results from your efforts. And, Greg does a brief case study on a live website that shows, well… it shows how to mess up this important piece of our marketing puzzle. Watch Greg’s video to learn how to completely mess up your CTA.
Transcript
Hi, and welcome to this brief, in a nutshell, video on website usability. Today’s site review topic is how to completely mess up the call to action on a website. That’s me, my name is Greg Mate. I’m from Search Engine Academy Montreal. I’m a certified SEO instructor and internet marketer and consultant, and a certified usability analyst. If you want to reach me, please go to searchengineacademy.ca. Today’s video is brought to you by Search Engine Academy. We are a global alliance of SEO trainers. We have SEO live workshops that we provide around the world and you can see us all on searchengineacademy.com.
We’re going to do three things, basically. I’m going to go take about 20 seconds to tell you why usability is crucial to your website, review what a call to action is, and and we’re going to look at the website and see the usability issues that I found there. Website usability, it’s really important, because if you get this wrong, people can’t do what you want them to do on your website, like buy or watch a video, or they can’t do what they want to do, like find out how to contact you, what your hours of operation are …
Your website usability can also affect how people feel about your brand and your products or services, and this is really important. If you mess up on your website, people can get upset. Whether you realize it or not, it really can positively or negatively affect a person’s feelings towards your website. I’ve seen a person during a usability test explain that they hate the company whose website they were looking at. They would never do business with them, all because they found the website too frustrating.
Briefly, a call to action is, on every page of your website, your visitors should be able to do something, or you should have something there for them to do. You need to define that with a call to action. The most obviously thing would be, again, to buy a product or watch a video or fill in a form or if it’s a educational website, you want them to read the information. You want it to be laid out in a way that they’re able to do that, so you should have a call to action on every page, and a call to action has to be evident. It should be near the top of the page. If it’s buried below the bottom of the screen where someone has to scroll down, there’s a good chance that they might not find it there.
Okay, I’m on the home page of this website. On the left is their call to action, “Get your first three months free.” It’s on this area on every page of the website, so we have to assume this offer is very important to the company. It wants its visitors to see this. This first issue is you can’t click on this three month offer. I first noticed this and I was actually on this other page, the bundles page, where I was trying to click on this and couldn’t get anywhere, so I went back to the home page where at least there’s a Learn More button. It took me a while to notice this Learn More button. It seems a little far away from the offer, a different color. “Learn More” is not something that really ties you into the offer. It’s also coming out of the back of this girl’s head. It would be better if it was one solid image, even if it’s two colors, so that it was more contiguous.
Finally, I click on the Learn More button, and it takes me back to this bundles page, where I first was trying to get to that offer. I look through this bundles page and it talks about bundles, the different types of security packages you can buy. Nowhere does it talk about how to get your first three months free. Maybe they want me to contact a specialist, I don’t know. It really doesn’t make sense to me, so to me, this is a terrible, really bad user experience. The most important thing this company wants to get across, and no one can find the information on the website.
I hope this video helped you get a few ideas of what to look out for and shows you how usability can not only affect how people feel about you, but whether or not they’re able to accomplish what you want them to do, and in this case, this most important thing. There’s comments here, hopefully … I’d love to hear your comments and experiences and perhaps we can continue the conversation. Please feel free to share this video with your best friends and most respected colleagues. This is Greg Mate. Peace out from Montreal.