  We investigate the Standard Model in the nearly conformal limit, in which
conformal symmetry is broken only by the dilatation anomaly, through a
hierarchy of anomalous Ward identities for the divergence of its dilatation
current. In this approximation, the identities allow to extract the coupling of
the dilaton to the trace anomaly, which we compute up to the quartic order in
the conformal breaking scale. Our approach can be easily extended to discuss
the anomaly contributions to the dilaton effective action to an arbitrarily
high order. They allow to make a distinction between the Higgs and a dilaton at
a phenomenological level.
