A Tagline That Says Nothing

The test

Read your tagline, then ask whether a competitor could put it on their own site without changing a word.

If they could, it is not saying anything about your business.

Quality you can trust, your local experts, and excellence in everything we do all fail that test immediately, which is why they are everywhere.

A line that every business in your trade could use is occupying the most visible space on the page and communicating nothing.

Why they end up generic

Because a tagline is written to sound like a tagline.

The form is familiar: short, positive, slightly elevated, using words like quality, trust, service and excellence.

Writing to that form produces something that sounds correct and means nothing, and it is difficult to notice because it resembles what taglines look like.

It also happens because a specific claim requires a decision about what the business actually is, which is harder than a general one.

What the line is actually for

• Saying what you do, for somebody who has just arrived.
• Saying where, which matters for a local business.
• Distinguishing you from the obvious alternatives.
• Confirming they are in the right place.

The fourth is the most valuable and the least glamorous. Somebody arriving from a search needs to know within a second that this is a business that does the thing they need, in their area.

The plainest option is frequently best

A description rather than a slogan.

Bathroom fitting in Coquitlam and the Tri-Cities. Emergency electrical, Vancouver, twenty-four hours. Commercial roofing across the Lower Mainland.

None of those is memorable and every one of them does the job.

Which is the trade worth making, since a local service business is not building a brand people recite. It is confirming, quickly, that somebody has arrived at the right place.

The memorable slogan is a consumer brand problem and it is rarely a small business one.

A worked example

A business whose homepage carried a three-word tagline under the logo, chosen during a rebrand, that described a quality rather than a service.

Nothing on the first screen said what the business did.

Somebody arriving from a general search had to scroll or read the menu to establish it.

They replaced it with the trade and the area, plainly, and moved the previous line further down the page where it did no harm.

Enquiries improved, and the explanation was simply that people now knew within a second whether to continue.

The rebrand had produced something that looked like a tagline and did none of a tagline's work.

The words that always fail

Worth listing, since they appear on a remarkable proportion of small business sites.

Quality, trust, professional, reliable, passionate, dedicated, committed, excellence, solutions, bespoke.

Each is a claim nobody would contradict about themselves, which is what makes them useless: no business advertises unreliability.

Which means the words carry no information, since the alternative was never available.

The replacement is not a better adjective but a fact: what you do, where, or something specific about how.

When something distinctive is possible

Where a real differentiator exists, the line should carry it.

Something a competitor could not honestly say: a guarantee, a specialism, a genuine constraint, a fact about how you work.

Fixed prices, quoted before we start. No subcontractors. Same day or you pay nothing.

Those are risky, because they commit the business to something, which is exactly what makes them persuasive.

And they only work if true, since a claim like that becomes a complaint the first time it is not honoured.

The name itself does some of this

Worth considering, since a descriptive name removes the problem entirely.

A business called something naming the trade needs no tagline to say what it does, which frees the line for something else.

A business with an abstract or personal name carries the whole burden in the tagline, and the line matters correspondingly more.

Which is worth knowing when choosing a name, since the two decisions are connected and are usually made separately.

The counter-case

Where a conventional tagline earns its place.

A business whose name already says what it does, where the line is free to do something else.

A consumer brand where recognition and feeling genuinely matter more than clarity.

An established business whose customers already know what it is, where the first-second question does not arise.

And a line that is genuinely good, which exists and is rarer than the number of taglines suggests.

Testing a replacement

A quick check before committing to anything.

Show the first screen to somebody outside the business, for five seconds, then ask what the business does and where.

If they can answer both, the line is working. If they answer neither, it is decorative.

That test takes a minute, requires nobody with any expertise, and settles most arguments about wording faster than discussing them.

It is also worth running on the current version first, since the result is frequently what makes the case for changing it.

Where the line appears

Worth knowing, since it turns up in more places than the homepage.

Under the logo, in the search result title if it is in the page title, on the van, on the letterhead, and in your listing description.

Which means a generic line is not wasting one space but several, and a descriptive one works in all of them.

The search result is the most consequential, since a title reading Quality You Can Trust tells somebody scanning results nothing about whether to click.

Whereas the trade and the town, in the same position, is the whole decision made for them.

Fixing yours

1. Ask whether a competitor could use it.
2. If yes, replace it.
3. Default to the trade and the area.
4. Or something a competitor could not honestly say.
5. Check it in your page title.
6. Keep the old one lower down if anybody is attached to it.

The sixth is a practical concession, since a tagline is frequently somebody's work and moving it is easier to agree than deleting it.

All of it is twenty minutes, and it changes what the most visible line on the site is doing.

What else sits in that space is covered in the fold argument and what replaced it.

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.