Be honest with yourself for a second. How many “click here” links are sitting on your site right now? Or in your email footers? Buried in your PDF guides and downloadable resources? If you’re like most people, the answer is more than you’d care to admit.
Why are ‘click here’ links bad?
They’re not the worst thing you can do in your copy, but it’s such a tiny thing to optimise that it could be so easy to make it better. If I could oversimplify the reason, they just don’t tell users or search engines where the link goes. On the surface, screen reader users can’t navigate efficiently when every link sounds the same. Other users have to stop and read the surrounding sentence for context.
While Google can see the destination URL and crawl the page, anchor text is still one of the signals it uses to understand relevance and context, so vague link text is a missed opportunity rather than a disaster. by replacing it with descriptive anchor text, accessibility, user experience and SEO is improved.
Why non-descriptive anchor text is bad for accessibility
When someone uses a screen reader, they often navigate by pulling up a list of all the links on a page. This is one of the fastest ways to scan a site without reading every word. Imagine hearing “click here, click here, click here, click here” with no idea where any of them go.
That’s the daily experience for millions of people, and it’s entirely avoidable.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are pretty clear on this. Link anchor text should make sense out of context. If you’re working in ecommerce and your business operates anywhere with accessibility legislation (which, increasingly, is everywhere), this isn’t just a nice-to-have.
It also helps users with cognitive disabilities, users on mobile who are navigating with one thumb, and honestly, anyone in a hurry. Which is most of us.
Why it’s bad for user experience
Users don’t read web pages. They scan them.
Eye-tracking studies have shown this for over twenty years now, and links act like little signposts within that scanning behaviour. A link that says “click here” is a signpost pointing nowhere useful. The reader has to stop, back up, and read the surrounding sentence to figure out what the link does.
A link that says “Download our 2025 Shopify migration checklist” tells the reader exactly what they’re getting before they commit to the click. They can decide in a fraction of a second whether it’s relevant to them. That’s the difference between a link people click and a link people scroll past.
This matters even more in email, where attention spans are shorter and people are deciding in milliseconds whether to engage. “Click here to download” is a wasted opportunity. “Download the migration planning template” sells the click, especially on mobile when it’s harder to preview the URL.
Why it’s bad for SEO
Google uses anchor text as a ranking signal. It’s been one of the foundational signals since the original PageRank paper, and it still matters today. The text inside a link tells search engines what the linked page is about. “Click here” doesn’t exactly tell Google nothing, but it says less.
“Download our free Shopify replatforming guide” tells Google and other search engines quite a lot. It signals topical relevance, it reinforces the keyword targeting of the destination page, and it builds context for both internal linking and the wider topical authority of your site. This applies to internal links across your own site and to any external links pointing back to you.
What is descriptive anchor text?
Descriptive anchor text is link text that describes where the link actually goes. If you’re linking to a vinyl record display category, instead of “click here”, the link (not the URL) becomes “shop our vinyl displays”. They can also become strong CTAs (Call to Action), like “Subscribe and save for 40% off”.
It’s a small shift, but it changes how the link functions for every single person who encounters it.
| Target link type | Before | After |
| Blog article | Click here | 10 recipes for weekday dinners in a rush |
| Registration form | Click here | Secure your place in 3 easy steps |
| Subscription form | Click here | Subscribe and save with a monthly plan |
| Contact page | Click here | Schedule a call with our Shopify specialists |
Additionally, be mindful of using images or icons to link to other pages (internal or external) without any surrounding anchor text, eg. above or next to the image. This is also not recommended for best SEO practices. Icons (eg. arrows) are usual, but they should precede or follow the anchor text.
What about repeating link patterns?
This is the most common objection I hear (often from designers) and it’s a fair one. Many ecommerce sites, resource hubs and blogs have the same pattern: a grid or list, each one ending in the same link or button. It’s a design convention, and rewriting every single CTA to be unique sounds like a nightmare.
The reason “read more” works in a card pattern (where it doesn’t work in body copy) is context. Each card already contains the article, product or resource title, often a thumbnail, and usually a short excerpt too. A screen reader user navigating the page in reading order hears the title first, then the excerpt, then the “read more” link. The link text on its own is still vague, but the surrounding card gives it meaning.
The problem only shows up when someone uses a screen reader, and on that page there’s tons of “read more, read more, read more, read more”, and there’s no context. That pattern is useless.
There are a few ways to fix this without redesigning your templates:
Use aria-label on the link
This is the quickest fix to implement. The visible text on the page stays as “read more” for design consistency, but the accessible name becomes specific. So your HTML looks something like:
<a href="/blog/shopify-migration-checklist" aria-label="Read more: Shopify migration checklist">Read more</a>Sighted users see “read more.” Screen reader users hear “Read more: 10 lightning-fast Shopify themes for skincare brands.” Everyone wins. This is the pattern most accessibility consultants will recommend, and it’s well-supported across screen readers.
Wrap the whole card in the link
If the entire card is clickable (which is increasingly common in design anyway), make the link wrap the title, excerpt and CTA together. The accessible name then comes from the article title, not the “read more” text. This is more of a redesign than a quick fix, but it’s worth considering if you’re already in a template refresh.
Make the title itself the link
Skip the separate “read more” CTA entirely and let the article title do the linking. In my opinion, this is the simplest pattern and works beautifully on most grids. The trade-off is that some users (and some clients, in my experience) like having a visible button-style CTA, so this depends on the design direction.
The title-as-link approach is the strongest pattern. It puts descriptive, keyword-relevant anchor text on every card by default, no aria-label workaround needed, and Google reads exactly what users see. If you’re working on a blog template and have the option to influence the design, that’s the route I’d push for.
How to audit your site for anchor text issues
Rewriting links one by one is fine if you spot them as you go, but if you’re working on a site of any real size, you need a proper audit process. Here’s how I’d approach it.
Start with a full site crawl
Run Screaming Frog across the site and export every internal link with its anchor text. Screaming Frog is my SEO tool of choice, and the free version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs per session.
That 500 limit covers everything the crawler finds, not just HTML pages. Images, CSS files, JavaScript and PDFs all count, so you can hit the cap faster than you’d expect on a media-heavy ecommerce site. For larger sites, the paid licence (£199 per year) removes the limit.
Once it’s finished crawling your site, you’ll need to look at the Inlinks (incoming links) report under Bulk Export › Links › All Anchor Text. This will export everything, and you’ll have more control over which anchor text to change (as opposed to exporting the “non-descriptive anchor text” report.
Prioritise by traffic and revenue
Updating the spreadsheet is just a reference point, so you’ll need to find the pages to update your link anchor text on your site’s cMS, such as Shopify or WordPress. In some cases, the work won’t be as heavy as you imagine. You may find there are tons of pages that all share the same template, so there’ll be just one place to update in your cms editor.
Once you’ve got your list, don’t try to fix everything at once. Pull your top pages by organic traffic and revenue, then start there. The links on a page getting 50,000 visits a month matter more than the links on a page getting 50. Same logic applies to product pages versus blog archive pages.
Set up a recurring check
Anchor text issues can creep back in over time, especially on ecommerce sites where new products, new collections and new CMS modules are added regularly. Schedule a quarterly crawl and a quick filter for vague anchors. Ten minutes every three months keeps the problem from rebuilding.
A quick rule to remember
Links should say where they lead, and direct your users. Once you start writing links this way, you’ll find it almost impossible to go back, and you’ll start spotting “click here” everywhere you look. Sorry in advance.
The good news is this is one of those rare SEO improvements that genuinely benefits your users at the same time. Links will be clearer, more inviting, and everyone wins.
