Content Written for a Business You No Longer Are

Businesses move continuously, websites move in bursts

That mismatch is the whole problem.

A business changes a little every month: a service is dropped, a better one is added, the type of customer shifts, prices rise, a specialism emerges.

None of those changes prompt anybody to open the website, because each is small and the site is not obviously wrong afterwards.

Three years of small changes later, the site describes a company that no longer exists, and nobody made a decision to let that happen.

How the drift shows up

Rarely as an obvious error. Usually as an accumulation of things that are technically defensible and no longer representative.

The services list includes two things you would now rather not be asked for.

The work you actually want, and are best at, is one line on a page four levels down.

The described customer is smaller, or larger, or in a different industry from the ones you now serve.

And the tone belongs to a business with three staff, written when there were three staff.

The cost is in who calls

An outdated site does not simply look stale. It actively sorts your enquiries.

People read what you say you do and call about that, so a site describing your 2017 business produces 2017 enquiries.

You then spend time explaining that you do not really do that any more, or worse, take the work because it arrived.

The enquiries you want are not arriving because nothing on the site tells anybody you do that now.

What drifts fastest

• Services, both dropped ones still listed and new ones missing.
• Prices and minimums, if you publish any.
• Staff, including people who left and people who joined.
• Service area, which usually expands quietly.
• Credentials, certifications, and memberships.
• Photographs, of premises, vehicles, and finished work.

The first two produce awkward conversations. The rest produce a general impression of a business that is not paying attention.

The about page is usually the worst

Because it is written once, at the beginning, with more care than anything else on the site, and that care makes it feel finished.

So it still says founded in 2011 with a passion for helping small local businesses, when you now work mainly with regional operators and have done for years.

It may also contain the founding story of a partnership that has since dissolved, or a team description with headcount that is now wrong in either direction.

Read it first, because it is the page prospects open after they have decided they are interested, which makes its accuracy disproportionately valuable.

Read it as a stranger

This is harder than it sounds, since you know what you meant.

A workable method is to read every page and, for each sentence, ask only whether it is true today, ignoring whether it is well written.

Mark three categories: true, false, and technically true but misleading.

That third pile is the interesting one. It is where the sentence was accurate when written, remains defensible, and now gives a reader the wrong idea about who you are.

Better still, have somebody outside the business read it and describe back what they think you do. The gap between their description and reality is your actual problem, stated plainly.

A worked example

An equipment servicing firm had grown from a two-person operation doing domestic call-outs into a nine-person business working mostly on commercial contracts.

The website still opened with a line about friendly local service for homeowners.

They were getting a steady flow of domestic enquiries they no longer wanted, and almost no commercial ones, and had attributed this to the market rather than to the site.

The audit marked forty-one sentences as false or misleading across eleven pages.

Nine were plain factual errors, including two services discontinued in 2018 and a staff member who had left in 2019.

The rest were positioning: an entire site aimed at a customer they had stopped serving.

The factual corrections took an afternoon. The repositioning took six weeks and was the part that changed the enquiries.

Fix the facts now, plan the positioning

These are genuinely different jobs and conflating them is how neither gets done.

Wrong facts are an immediate correction: a departed staff member, a discontinued service, an old price, an expired certification. No planning required and no reason to wait.

Wrong positioning is a project. It touches the homepage, the services structure, the about page, and often the navigation, and doing it properly means deciding what the business is now before writing anything.

Do the first this week. Schedule the second, with a date, or it will still be pending next January.

What is missing entirely

Drift is not only about what is wrong. It is also about what was never added.

The service you started offering two years ago and have never written a page for, because you were busy delivering it.

The type of client you now do your best work for, who is not mentioned anywhere.

The certification you earned last year, the larger premises, the second vehicle, the equipment that lets you take on jobs you previously turned away.

These are harder to spot than errors, because nothing on the page looks wrong. The page simply does not exist, and a gap does not draw the eye the way a mistake does.

The practical method is to work from the business rather than the site: list what you sell today, then check which items have a page. The ones without are the omissions.

The counter-case

Not all drift is bad, and rushing to eliminate it can cost you.

A service you rarely perform may still be worth listing if it brings people in who then buy something else.

An older founding story may be an asset rather than a liability, because longevity is exactly what some buyers are checking for.

And a business genuinely in transition may reasonably describe both what it does now and where it is heading, provided it does so deliberately rather than by accident.

The test is whether the content is there on purpose. Deliberate breadth is a strategy; accumulated breadth is neglect, and they look identical from the outside.

The review

1. List every page on the site, including the forgotten ones.
2. Read each sentence and mark it true, false, or misleading.
3. Correct every false statement this week.
4. Ask an outsider what they think you do.
5. Compare that to what you want to be known for.
6. Schedule the repositioning with an actual date.
7. Repeat annually, because it will drift again.

An hour a year keeps a site roughly honest. Nothing keeps it honest permanently, because the business will not hold still.

Vagueness is the related failure, covered in a consultant site that says nothing specific.

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.