An ingrained call-to-action (CTA) is an alternative to the common practice of dedicating an entire paragraph to urging readers to call or contact your law firm. The traditional way of writing CTAs has become so ubiquitous that readers tend to ignore them. Ingraining the CTA into a post can fix this, though the technique is not a perfect solution.
What is a Call-to-Action?
The call-to-action, or CTA, is the part of an online article that urges readers to do some specific thing. For online legal content marketing, that specific thing you want your readers to do is almost always going to be to contact your firm online or call your law office. We’re talking about the passage that says:
If you or a loved one has been hurt in a car accident, call the personal injury lawyers at the ABC Law Firm at (XXX) YYY-ZZZZ or contact them online. We serve clients in City M, County N, and throughout State O.
While getting readers to contact your firm is the primary function of a CTA, that’s not necessarily the only thing that it can do. For example, a CTA can also be a great place to add the internal links for the pages that you want to promote on your site, but that you weren’t able to include organically in the rest of the article (so long as you don’t add so many links in the CTA that it dilutes their potency). It can also be used to refer to the areas where your firm practices, to score some local SEO points.
Traditionally, the CTA is added to the bottom of a post in its own paragraph, just like we did here, in this article (go ahead, scroll down and take a look).
What are the Drawbacks of a Traditional CTA?
The biggest drawback of a traditional CTA is simple: Overuse. Everyone uses a traditional CTA. Their ubiquity has become the CTA’s downfall, as studies have suggested that readers skip over them when they see them in an online article.
This poses a serious concern for online content marketing. If readers don’t even look at a traditional CTA at the bottom of the page, does that make it pointless to include?
Not necessarily. A traditional CTA still provides a medium for those internal links, geographical information, and the opportunity to include some important keywords – like your firm’s name and practice areas – in a header to solidify your rankings in branded searches and pursue highly competitive vanity keywords. We also think that the readers who are already interested in reaching out to your firm are likely to see a CTA as a convenient way to do it.
But readers skipping CTAs because they recognize them is still a big drawback.
What is an Ingrained Call-to-Action and How Does It Work?
An ingrained CTA is an urge to readers to do a specific action that is woven into the meat of an online article. They are CTAs in hiding. Because they do not come below a header that tells readers that they are about to read a CTA, they can ambush the reader by urging them to do something without warning.
Seamlessly fitting ingrained CTAs into a landing page or legal blog post is not easy, though. If done poorly, it can feel heavy-handed and forced, and that can alienate readers by making them realize that what they are reading is really just an advertisement for your law firm. Thankfully, the professional legal bloggers at Myers Freelance LLC use ingrained CTAs all the time and have the experience needed to subtly include them in your firm’s content marketing. Contact us online to get started on your firm’s website.
See?
That was an ingrained call-to-action. When there is no header that signals to readers that they are about to get pushed towards taking a specific action, and when the CTA is folded into useful information that the reader wants to learn, you can get visitors to read the CTA.
What are the Problems With an Ingrained CTA?
Ingrained CTAs are not perfect, though. The main drawback is that, precisely because they are ingrained, they will not include a header. Without the header, you lose the opportunity to fit your sought-after keywords in the header text, which search engines like Google weigh more heavily than normal text.
This is a Traditional CTA: Myers Freelance LLC, the Professional Legal Bloggers
If you or a loved one runs a law firm and has been injured by poor website performance, reach out to the professional legal bloggers and online legal content marketers at Myers Freelance LLC by contacting them online for a free consultation.