One of my pet-industry colleagues suggested that I write about this common problem with websites: misguided hyperlinks. A misguided hyperlink is either a broken link because it takes your site visitor to an error page, or it’s a useless link because it lands on a page that makes no sense to your prospect.
Everyone’s guilty of an unintentional misguided hyperlink now and then. But what’s the big deal? No harm done, right? Well …
Let’s spend a moment thinking about the impact of a single misguided hyperlink.
Here’s what happened to my colleague the other day, in her words:
“I can’t remember what I was looking for at the time. But I clicked on the hyperlink within the text and it took me to the company’s homepage. Not even close to the product or book or whatever I was hoping to see. Then when I did a search, it didn’t pop up immediately and required too much of my time. So what did I do? I closed the window and moved on to other things.”
This sounds like a marketing disaster to me.
This experience is a missed opportunity to delight the site visitor at that moment. She might have become a long-time loyal customer willing to spend big bucks with that company. But poof — a misguided hyperlink ended the budding relationship in a nanosecond.
So we can’t afford to take misguided hyperlinks lightly!
Here’s the simple solution. Test your hyperlinks every so often. Make sure each one goes to a page that makes sense to visitors and moves them toward a buying decision or connection with you … whether it links to your Contact Us page or a product-detail page or even a newsletter issue in the archives. Every little hyperlink matters.
So my quick tip of the day is this:
Regularly test your website hyperlinks so you don’t disappoint site visitors and possibly lose them forever.
Until next time,
Here’s to a clear and prosperous site!
Pam
PetCopywriter.com
