A Glossary for a Trade Full of Jargon

Two quotes in a language nobody explained

A homeowner has two quotes for her living room floor. One says screen and recoat. The other says sand and refinish, three coats, site-finished.

The second costs considerably more. Nothing on either page explains the difference, so she assumes it is the same job at two prices and picks the cheaper one.

A week later the floor is shinier and every scratch is still there.

Every trade has words like these, and they tend to appear exactly where a customer is deciding: on the quote, the invoice and the service page.

Where jargon does its damage

• Quotes, where two prices describe different jobs in words nobody defined.
• Invoices, where an unfamiliar line item looks like padding.
• Service pages, written by the people who do the work.
• Phone calls, where staff use the words they use with each other.
• Warranties, whose terms depend on words the customer has never seen.

The second is the one that costs goodwill. A customer who does not recognise a line on an invoice tends to suspect it, and a doubt over a small charge can sour an otherwise good job.

What a glossary page is

A page of plain definitions for the words your business actually uses with customers, one to three sentences each, listed alphabetically or grouped by stage of the job.

It is not a dictionary of the whole trade, a list copied from a manufacturer's catalogue, or a page stuffed with search phrases. Twenty useful entries beat two hundred thin ones.

Each entry should answer the question a customer would ask about the word, which is rarely just what it means. Usually it is what it means for them.

Finding the words

Start with paper. Take ten recent quotes and invoices and underline every term a homeowner might not know.

Then ask whoever answers the phone which words customers ask about, and which ones they confuse with each other. The confusions make the most valuable entries.

Ask the newest person on the team what puzzled them in their first month. They still remember not knowing.

Note the words customers use instead, such as redoing the floors for refinishing. Those belong in the entries too, because they are what people type into a search box.

Writing each entry

Say what it is in plain words, then why it matters to the customer: what it costs relative to the alternatives, how long it lasts, and when it is the wrong choice.

Screen and recoat: a light abrasion of the existing finish followed by a fresh coat. It refreshes a dull floor in a day, but it does not remove scratches that go through the finish or change the colour.

Sand and refinish: sanding the floor to bare wood, staining it if wanted, and applying new coats of finish. It removes most scratches and allows a new colour, and takes several days including drying.

Two entries like that, read side by side, settle the question the homeowner could not settle with the quotes alone.

Linking it from where the words appear

A glossary nobody finds is a page written for search engines. Its value comes from being one tap away when the word appears.

On service pages, link the first use of each term to its entry, so the reader can check it and come straight back.

On quotes, add a line giving the address of the page. Estimators can also send the link after any call where a term needed explaining.

Give each entry its own anchor, a short addition to the page address that jumps straight to that word, so a link lands on the right definition rather than the top of the page.

A worked example

A hardwood flooring company sold three kinds of work: installation, full refinishing, and the lighter screen and recoat for floors that were dull but not damaged.

Its quotes used the trade's terms, and customers kept choosing the recoat for floors that needed refinishing, because it was cheaper and sounded much the same.

The customer expected the scratches gone, the crew had done exactly what was quoted, and the estimator had to explain the difference after the fact.

The company wrote a glossary of about twenty-five terms, starting with the two that caused the trouble, then engineered and solid wood, wear layer, acclimatisation and subfloor preparation.

Every quote now ends with a line pointing to the page, and the refinishing and recoat pages link to each other's entries. The difference is explained before the customer chooses rather than after the crew leaves.

Expertise without showing off

Plain definitions show expertise better than claims of it. Explaining a technical thing simply requires understanding it, and readers sense that.

The honest notes do the most work. An entry that says when the cheaper option is the wrong choice tells the reader the business is not simply steering them to the more expensive one.

Keep the tone level. No years of experience, no superlatives, no sales lines inside definitions; the page is useful precisely because it is not selling.

What search engines do with it

People search for these words: what is screen and recoat, engineered or solid hardwood. A clear two-sentence definition answers exactly that kind of question.

Keep the entries on one page. A separate page for each term, with two sentences on it, is thin, and a site full of thin pages serves nobody well.

Where a term needs a full explanation, write a proper page for it and link to that page from the glossary entry. The glossary then doubles as an index to the site's best explanations.

The counter-case

A business with a handful of terms, or very standard work, does not need a separate page. Define the word in a sentence where it first appears and leave it there.

In fields where definitions carry legal or financial weight, such as insurance, accounting or law, keep entries general, have them checked, and say that the page is not advice.

And a glossary does not fix a quote written badly. If the quote itself can be written in plain words, do that first.

Where the jargon cannot be avoided, a glossary linked from the places it appears is one of the most useful pages a trade site can have.

Building it

1. Collect ten recent quotes and invoices.
2. Underline every term a customer asked about.
3. Add the words customers use instead.
4. Write each entry in two or three sentences.
5. Say when each option is the wrong choice.
6. Link the terms from service pages and quotes.
7. Review the list once a year.

Step six is what turns a page into a tool. Linked from the quote, the glossary is read at the moment of decision instead of sitting unvisited in the footer menu.

Writing in the customer's words follows the same logic as headlines that say what the page is.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.