Calls to action are as essential to SEO as keywords. You research keywords because they are the main driver of internet traffic. They get visitors to your website. Calls to action are designed to encourage those visitors to become customers. Understand that healthcare websites need calls to action just as much as any other type of site. At the end of the day, patients are still customers.
A call to action encourages a website visitor to make a decision about the information gleaned. The exact decision is up to you. One call to action might encourage visitors to subscribe to an email list. Another might invite the visitor to get more information. Still another call to action is an encouragement to buy, which may not be as relevant to healthcare websites.
Coming Up with Great CTAs
Known as CTAs for short, calls to action should not be created randomly. There are sound strategies that companies like ours utilize to come up with great CTAs. In a nutshell, here is how to do it for a healthcare site:
- Do an inventory of the information/product/services you want visitors to make a decision about.
- Think about words associated with those things that might encourage visitors to take action.
- Define the benefit of the CTA. In other words, what will visitors get out of answering the call?
- Write your CTAs, keeping them short, clear, and concise.
Examples of Action Words
CTAs do not have to be fancy. More often than not, they are as simple and plain as can be. The idea is not to wow visitors with impressive language. The goal is to meet them where they are; to encourage a positive decision while speaking their language. To that and, here are a few examples of proven action words:
- Sign up
- Subscribe
- Download
- Learn more
- Get help.
The key to making optimal use of CTAs is to make them anchor text for other links. If you are talking about a CTA on your own website, it is going to offer an internal link. Guest post and other external content CTAs are formatted with inbound links to your site.
How effective are CTAs formatted as anchor text? Highly effective. They can generate upwards of 120% more action than simple banner ads and other types of inbound and outbound links.
Different Types of CTAs
There is little doubt that CTAs work. When you challenge a visitor to make a decision, that person will. Either your CTA will be ignored, or it will be acted on. Both are active decisions the visitor has to make. With that in mind, there are different types of CTAs that tend to work for healthcare websites:
- Information – Healthcare websites are not necessarily designed to sell products or services directly. But they are gold mines of information. An information CTA encourages visitors to learn more.
- Interaction – An interactive CTA encourages visitors to do something like schedule an appointment, ask a question, learn office hours, etc.
- Subscription – A subscription CTA encourages visitors to sign up for email updates, newsletters, and so forth.
- Contact – The contact CTA advises visitors to get in touch through email or an online form. Healthcare websites frequently encourage visitors to contact them for more information.
Healthcare is a business not unlike any other. It is important that healthcare websites be designed in such a way as to encourage visitors to become paying customers. That is what the CTA is all about. It challenges visitors to do something with the information they have gleaned. That’s just what your site needs, and we can make it happen. Reach out to us to learn how Webtek can optimize your website for CTAs that will convert your website visitors.
