Why not “Click Here”?
by Tony
When you’re surfing around the World-wide web, the phrase “click here” is everywhere, jumping out at you from websites and banners wherever you look. It’s the call-to-action of choice for online copywriters who so badly want you to bring your eyes to their content and your overheated credit-card numbers to their online purchase forms.
But is it the right text to be using in a link?
“What do you mean? Of course it’s right,” cry those hard-working copywriters. “I want the user to click there, so I write ‘click here’! Obvious.”
Obvious it is. It’s the clearest way of telling a user where to go. But as a writer of the web, are you really doing yourself and your site a favour? Let’s look into this.
Your best friend
In the web business, Google is your friend. It brings you traffic and revenue. You have other friends of course – like Bing and Yahoo! – but when you’re planning your holiday in South America, you don’t “Yahoo!” or “Bing” information about llamas. You “Google” it. In the same way that we “hoover” the living room, Google has so conquered the public consciousness that it has attained that holy grail of products and services — it has become a verb. And so far, it leads while others follow, at about 65% of market share (Source: Wired magazine) — so for this example, I will use it as our search engine of choice.
At a very basic level, Google works on links. The PageRank system that Google uses to grade pages relies a lot on the quality of inbound links to a page — the more high-quality links to a page from other highly ranked pages, the better.
What makes a high-quality link?
A link contains at least two pieces of data, principally:
- The destination URL e.g. “http://www.cbr250.com”
- The Link Text e.g. “Click Here!”
Here is our sample link: Click Here!
When Google looks at the two pieces of information in the link above, it’s going to see quite obviously where the link is headed: it’s going to cbr250.com. However, that’s all it’s got.
If we want to give Google a little helping hand, we can enrich this link by telling it what the destination URL is all about. CBR250.com is my little brother’s website about motorbikes, so I could be giving him a helping hand by…
Ha. Did you see what I did there? website about motorbikes. That link goes to the same place, but supplies a little more information about what the destination URL is all about. This is valuable Google-fodder. Somewhere deep in the GooglePlex, that URL just got racheted up a notch in the ‘motorbikes websites’ category.
There are always exceptions
From a search and semantics point of view, that’s absolutely the best way to write link text: add meaning to the link by wrapping the words that describe the content of the linked page. When we use a generic imperative such as “Click here” in a link, we’re starving the link of the valuable context it can provide to the search engines, to enable them to understand our pages as well as possible.
But what happens when the user’s already on your page and we’re faced with the challenge of compelling them to purchase? This is a different kettle of fish. At this point, Google has done its work and brought the user to our site. If we’ve optimised for search properly, we’ve managed to lead them to a page that aligns closely with their heart’s desire, and we just need to tip them over the edge. Here, a carefully chosen imperative can do the trick. “Buy now” lacks the richness of “Buy the new Braun 350D toaster now“, but at this stage it doesn’t matter as much – we’re in the drop zone already. We’re out of the remit of SEO and into the realms of human-computer interaction and persuasion engineering.
Conclusions
When writing copy for your web pages, bear in mind the functional requirements of the page. If you’re promoting a service, providing a link to something like a terms & conditions document from a product page, you should consider what the best way to link to this might be. It’s not a page we really really need the customer to read – we have to assume they do on sign-up, but we know they don’t most of the time. We’re all customers ourselves, and did you read that last iTunes T&C? With this in mind, the “do it now” approach is not really appropriate. Taking an example:
To view the terms & conditions, click here.
Buy the toaster now and be in with a chance to win.
A couple of points on this choice of copy:
- As discussed earlier, we’ve starved the link of some valuable context by failing to use the key words in the sentence as the anchor for the link.
- On the other hand, they might be slightly more likely to click it (See this interesting Dustin Curtis article), but do we want them distracted by something like this when they could be off somewhere else buying stuff? This link is competing with a “Buy Now” link on the same page. The customer’s focus should be directed as much as possible towards that link, as it’s our primary revenue opportunity on this page. No distractions please!
- We’ve also broken the flow of our piece. The command interrupts the customer’s scanning by demanding attention straight away. Experienced surfers probably have built-in immunity, but not all customers are at that level.
(And yes, I’m aware of the distraction I created with my Dustin Curtis link text — top marks!)
You might prefer to write something like:
We think we’ve put together a really nice package for you. Of course, it’s subject to terms and conditions, and you should know that we safeguard your data as though it was our own.
You really should buy this toaster now.
In the real world, there’s likely going to be a big red button somewhere in this picture, but let’s stick to the copy for the moment. This piece has a reasonable flow to it, and the only call-to-action is in the “buy now” link. You’ll notice that the “safeguard your data” link was quite an oblique allusion to the privacy policy associated with the same promotion. There’s no harm in being this abstracted about link text, as long as the link is reinforced somewhere else in the document using the link text “privacy policy” for those who might not have got it the first time around. This kind of thing can be reserved for a “next steps” section at the conclusion of the article, which, assuming we don’t want them to buy a toaster right now, can help them to review the opportunities that your page has offered.
So that’s the deal with link text. The case is never closed on a topic like this – best practices change all the time as we learn more about how our minds work with and process information on the web.
If you’ve any feedback or additional points or arguments for or against my own, please post your comments. I’d be keen to read your thoughts.
References
http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html