Your website serves as the primary online face of your business. As such, it should be compelling, effectively convey your brand voice, and offer an efficient and useful experience for your visitors. At the same time, your website should naturally guide the visitor toward accomplishment of the key conversion goals for your business.
While you may want website visitors to take a variety of actions on your site, it’s important to remember that not everything can be top priority. Each page’s conversion goals should be relevant to the content of that page, offering the visitor a natural and logical navigation path to their next step. A frequent website mistake is having too many competing conversion goals on the Home page.
For years, the most common way to lead visitors to additional website content was the phrase click here. While it’s descriptive, it’s neither the most effective nor the savviest way to get people to click, and furthermore, it makes you look like a rookie.
So how do you get visitors to explore your site and encourage click-throughs to your key goals?
3 ways to encourage click-throughs (without saying “click here”)
1. Offer a video demo
Not only is use of video one of the top ways to attract the attention of search engines, demonstrating the value of your product is also an extremely effective way to move visitors toward purchase.
Rather than stating “Click here to see how our product works,” simply provide a video demo to show the visitor. Include a few words that offer context, like those on the footer of the screen shot.
2. Use an image and teaser copy
Lead visitors to explore further by integrating a relevant visual and a snippet of content to spark interest. The combination of an image, content and call to action is very effective in getting the the visitor to click through for more detail.
With the proper metatags included, the graphical element provides a signal to search engines, while the combination of an image and a consumable tidbit of content compels visitor to click through for more detail.
3. Add a contextual link
While the words “click here” are generally undesirable, too many images can compete with one another and become a distraction. Contextual links, embedded within the copy, may work most effectively.
Be intentional when selecting the words to hyperlink, taking care not to hyperlink an entire sentence or paragraph.
In determining the linked text, consider what the reader will encounter upon clicking through. Is it to learn more? View a demo? See customer testimonials or review case studies? When descriptive words become the actual hyperlink, a signal is provided to search engines reinforcing the relevancy of the link destination. Be certain that your text links are highlighted in color, bold and/or underline to convey to the user that they are hyperlinked text.
What’s next?
Take a few minutes to look over your own site and replace any incidences of “click here” with more effective alternatives.
If you’d like more helpful advice or guidance to optimize your website or amplify your online effectiveness, we’re here to help.
This post was published previously on OnlineAmplify.com and has been updated for relevance and timeliness.
Great ideas. “Click here” no more!