Ready to grow?Short answer: Anchor text is the clickable words in a link, the blue underlined bit you tap. Those words are a label that tells readers and Google what is on the other side. "Click here" tells them nothing. "Our emergency drain unblocking service" tells them exactly what they get. That is the rule: describe where the link goes.
You already write links, probably without thinking about them. Your bakery menu links to a page. Your "book a repair" button links to a booking form. Every one of those links has clickable words wrapped around it, and those words have a name.
So what exactly is anchor text?
Take this sentence on a plumber's site: "For a blocked drain, book our emergency drain unblocking service." The words "emergency drain unblocking service" are underlined and clickable. Tap them and you land on the service page. Those clickable words are the anchor text. The web address they point to is hidden underneath. What people see is the words.
Google says the same thing in plain language. Its SEO Starter Guide puts it like this: "Link text (also known as anchor text) is the text part of a link that you can see. This text tells users and Google something about the page you're linking to." The guide goes on: with appropriate anchor text, "users and search engines can easily understand what your linked pages contain before they visit."
Read that last part again. Before they visit. The words do their job before anyone clicks. A reader skimming your page decides whether the link is worth tapping based on nothing but the words. Google reads those same words to work out what the destination page is about. So a link is not just a doorway. It is a doorway with a sign on it, and you write the sign.
Why do the words matter so much?
Because a link with no description is a door with no sign. Picture a bakery blog post that ends with "We also run classes. Click here." Click here for what. Sourdough. Croissants. A kids' cupcake afternoon. The reader has to guess, or click and hope. Now picture the same sentence written as "We also run a Saturday sourdough class for beginners." The words carry the meaning. Nobody has to guess.
Google's own link guidance spells out the rule and even shows the good-versus-bad examples. It says: "Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to." It lists as too generic a link that says "Click here to learn more," "Read more," or "on our website." As the better version, it shows the descriptive wording "see the list of cheese types." Same link, same destination. The only thing that changed is the words, and the words are the whole point.
The one rule that fixes most links
Describe the destination. That is it. Before you make any words clickable, ask one question: if someone read only these underlined words and nothing around them, would they know where the link goes? If yes, you are done. If no, rewrite the words to say where it goes.
That single question kills almost every bad link on a small business site. It turns "click here" into "our Saturday sourdough class." It turns "read more" into "how we proof our dough overnight." It turns "this page" into "our boiler servicing plans." You do not need clever wording. You need honest wording. Say where the link goes, then stop.
Here are three real before-and-after rewrites you can copy the pattern from:
- Before: "We fix leaks fast. Click here." After: "We fix leaks fast, usually a same-day emergency call-out."
- Before: "Want to know our full menu? Read more." After: "Have a look at our full breakfast and lunch menu."
- Before: "New guide on descaling. Learn more." After: "Read our step-by-step guide to descaling a coffee machine."
Notice what did not happen. Nobody added jargon. Nobody stuffed keywords. The rewrite just moved the description into the clickable words, where the reader and Google can actually see it.
The owner do and don't list
Keep this next to you the next time you add a link. The don't column is a small set of dead-end phrases that show up on almost every website and describe nothing.
Don't make these the clickable words:
- click here
- read more
- learn more
- this page
- this article
- website
- here
Do make the clickable words something like these instead:
- our emergency drain unblocking service
- how we make our sourdough
- book a boiler service
- our winter opening hours
- read the full ingredient list
The do column all pass the same test. Read the underlined words alone and you know where you are going. The don't column all fail it. That is the only difference that matters.
The accessibility reason it matters too
There is a second reason to describe your links, and it is the same fix, so you get it for free. Some visitors use a screen reader, software that reads a page aloud, often because they are blind or have low vision. One thing screen reader users do is pull up a list of every link on a page, on its own, to jump around quickly. Imagine hearing that list. "Click here. Read more. Here. Click here. Learn more." It is useless. Nobody can tell those links apart.
WebAIM, a long-running web accessibility group, says it directly: "Links are more useful when they make sense out of context." Its guidance tells authors to avoid non-informative link phrases and lists the usual suspects, "click here," "here," "more," "read more," and "info." It gives a clean example: a link that reads "click here to access today's weather" can simply be "today's weather." Same words that help Google understand your link help a blind visitor understand it too. You fix it once, and both problems are solved.
Having built and edited pages for owner-run shops for a while, the pattern that shows up again and again is the "read more" link at the bottom of every blog post, identical on all of them, because it came baked into a template. The owner never wrote those words on purpose. They just never changed them. Swapping each one for a plain description of that specific post is usually a fifteen-minute job across a whole site, and it is the single most common quick win we see on a small business blog. Nothing fancy. Just words that finally say something.
Where you actually use this: your own pages
For a small business, the links that matter most are the ones between your own pages and blog posts. Your menu page links to your sourdough blog post. Your "book a repair" button links to your booking page. Your homepage links to your services. Every one of those is a chance to write a clear little signpost, both for a customer clicking through and for Google working out how your site fits together.
This is where descriptive anchors quietly earn their keep. When you link from your menu to your sourdough post using the words "how we make our sourdough," you are telling Google that the post is about making sourdough. Google's John Mueller, a search advocate at the company, explained why in a webmaster hangout. He said internal linking "helps us on the one hand to find pages" and "also helps us to get a bit of context about that specific page," and that "we get some of that from the anchor text from the internal linking." The words you make clickable are a hint about the page they point to.
If you want to go deeper on the wider habit of connecting your pages, that is a topic of its own, and it sits alongside the basics in our guide to the on-page SEO basics that actually move the needle. When you are writing a new post and dropping links into it, our walkthrough on how to write a blog post that ranks covers where those internal links belong.
The trap: don't stuff the same words into every link
Here is the mistake that goes the other way. Once an owner learns that descriptive anchors help Google understand a page, the temptation is to paste the exact same keyword into twenty links, all pointing at the same page, to force it. "Emergency plumber London" here, "emergency plumber London" there, over and over. Do not do that. It reads as manipulation, because it is.
Google's own spam policies call this out by name. The "link spam" policy explicitly includes "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases," and its example shows a paragraph stuffed with keyword links back to back, "wedding rings," "best ring," "buy flowers," "wedding dress," jammed together. That unnatural pattern is exactly what you are trying to avoid on your own pages. A run of identical keyword links looks engineered, not written.
Mueller said as much in that same hangout. He told a publisher not to over-do it: you do not need to turn a reasonable anchor into "buy your cheese online here" or "the ultimate guide to all types of cheese here." If you are "using a reasonable anchor text," he said, that "sounds perfectly fine." Reasonable, natural wording is all you ever need. Describe the page once, the way a normal person would say it, and move on. This over-optimizing instinct is one of the more common own-goals we flag in our roundup of the SEO mistakes small businesses make most.
What anchor text is not
Two quick things to keep straight, because they are easy to mix up. Anchor text is not the web address. The address in the browser bar, the readable slug with the hyphens, is a separate string, and we cover writing those in the guide to clean, readable URLs. The anchor text is the visible label on the linking page. The URL is the hidden destination underneath it.
The other one: images can be links too, and when an image is a link, Google treats its alt text like anchor text. That is worth knowing, but it is really a job for the image side of things, so we handle it fully in our guide to writing alt text for your images. For plain word links, everything above is what you need.
Frequently asked questions
Do I really need to fix "click here" links on my site?
You do not need perfect anchors on every link, but "click here" and "read more" are worth fixing because they describe nothing. Google's guidance calls them too generic, and screen reader users cannot tell them apart in a link list. The fix takes seconds: replace the generic words with a short description of where the link goes.
How long should anchor text be?
Long enough to describe the destination, short enough to read as a natural phrase. Google's advice is that good anchor text is "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant." A few words usually does it, like "our boiler servicing plans" or "how we make our sourdough." If you are writing a whole sentence as one link, that is too long.
Is it bad to use the same anchor text more than once?
Using a phrase twice on a big site is fine and completely natural. The problem is deliberately stuffing the identical keyword into many links to force a ranking, which Google's spam policy lists as link spam. As John Mueller put it, reasonable anchor text is perfectly fine. Just do not repeat one keyword over and over on purpose.
Does anchor text matter for links between my own pages?
Yes, and those are the links you control most. When you link your menu to a blog post using descriptive words, you help both the reader and Google understand what that post is about. Mueller confirmed Google gets context about a page partly from the anchor text of internal links pointing at it.
The whole thing comes down to the sign on the door. "Click here" is a door with no sign, and it leaves your reader, Google, and anyone using a screen reader guessing. Describe where each link goes, in plain words, and stop worrying about it. That is the kind of small, quiet fix Fonzy handles across a site so you can get back to running the shop.
Sources
- Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide: defines anchor text as the visible link text that tells users and Google about the linked page
- Google Search Central, Link best practices: says good anchor text is descriptive and concise, with "click here" and "read more" as bad examples
- WebAIM, Links and Hypertext: explains why link text should make sense out of context for screen reader users
- Google Search Central, Spam policies: lists optimized anchor text as a form of link spam
- Search Engine Journal: John Mueller on how internal anchor text gives Google context, and why reasonable wording beats over-optimizing
