03Nov2009

The Importance of Links as Calls to Action

I enjoyed this conversion rate analysis by Dustin Curtis on the link he places at the bottom of his articles to his Twitter account.

It's fascinating to see the results of this sort of A/B testing, especially when the results can be so dramatic.

Most of the time when you're running a website you're focused on the larger things — adding new content and features, increasing usability, improving page speed, etc. So little time is spent on the details, such as how a link should be written.

However, it's clear that this is an area where you can receive the most return on your time invested. Setting up a test using Google's Website Optimizer or just adding some campaign tracking tags to the link URL is quite easy to do with a little practice.

One particular bone of contention for me has always been promos or ads where the call-to-action (CTA) link reads "Learn more" or "Read more." It's so weak; almost anything would be better than this.

So much time is typically spent making the banner look visually appealing compared with the content that is driving people to click through.

This issue of weak CTAs often arises for two reasons:

The content author doesn't really understand about writing for the web and how it is an interactive medium requiring strong, direct calls-to-action to be successful.
The content is not seen by the author in context. It is written and approved in MS Word and then handed off to be added to the site. There's no review of the content in-place where the author can see how well it works within the constraints of how it is being presented.

One solution to this is to write a web style guide that specifically explains how content should be optimized for web presentation (headings, links, lists, etc).

It's not hard to do and has the added advantage of creating a common understanding of how content — which can often be so subjective — should be written for the web within an organization.

[via Gerry McGovern]

Posted on: November 3, 2009 | 9 Comments

9 Comments Posted

Content is King! I find myself often re-writing bits of copy from the 'business' to make it more suitable for the web site. Not only are proper call to actions part of good usability, they're also crucial for SEO improvements.

1. Posted by Evan Skuthorpe on November 04, 2009

Writing for the web is admittedly a hard task indeed. Often the way something looks will influence the user to click-through, but I suppose the majority of people who click-through are people that actually care about the subject in question; meaning, no matter what the link is described as, if it looks like it could be of interest to the user they're more likely to click it!

2. Posted by James on November 04, 2009

Good post. It certainly helps with seo to use a valid desciption as opposed to 'read more' or 'click here' which means nothing to the crawlers.

john

3. Posted by Egg Web Design on November 08, 2009

content is king, i agree. there's no way you can beat great relevant content!! but for a new site, if you want to speed up your traffic and google rankings, link building is the best way to handle. even if the site is not new, link building should be on a the to do list of any internet marketing campaign.

4. Posted by John Zagurasky on November 15, 2009

Content and coding are the main key but linkbacks are important!

5. Posted by 91754 on November 28, 2009

ya, content is king but link to your site is very useful for Google rankings and make website visibility popular.

6. Posted by drupal development services on December 10, 2009

Good job here - this will be a great reference when explaining to clients why "click here" is inadequate for link text.

7. Posted by washington dc web designer on December 12, 2009

Calls to action like this are also great to use in forum signatures!

8. Posted by Jason on December 15, 2009

GOOGLE says Content ..!! Really good work, help full for SEO.. and developer also .

9. Posted by London Website Designing on January 08, 2010