Replace 'Click Here' With Descriptive Link Labels
Generic link labels like “click here” give scanning visitors nothing to latch onto (Nielsen Norman Group, 2017). A visitor who lands on that link learns nothing about where it goes without stopping to read the sentence around it.
What the research observed
Eye-tracking research describes a pattern called spotted scanning. Instead of reading line by line, visitors’ eyes jump to things that stand out, such as links, bold text, color, digits, and capital letters, or to words that match what they are looking for. Links are among the first things a scanner sees.
When the link text is “click here,” the scanner stops on it and gets no information. To find out what the link does, they have to read the surrounding text, which is the reading they were trying to skip. The same research found that scanners read the first words of links and headings more than anything else, so a label that starts with its key word puts the answer exactly where the eye lands.
What it means for a business website
On a business site, links and buttons are how visitors move toward a sale or an inquiry. Labels such as “click here,” “submit,” or a bare “here” force each visitor to work out what will happen next. Descriptive labels such as “Roofing estimate request” or “Pricing for monthly plans” tell them at a glance, and they let visitors skip the links they do not need.
This is a writing fix, not a design project.
What to do
- Search your site for “click here,” “here,” and other labels that do not describe their destination, and rewrite them.
- Start each link and button label with the word that carries the meaning, such as “Pricing” or “Estimate.”
- Make link text match the title of the page it leads to, so visitors know they arrived in the right place.
Sources
- Pernice. F-Shaped Pattern of Reading: Misunderstood, But Still Relevant. Nielsen Norman Group, 2017.