Describing a Service Without Listing Features

The default that does not work

Most service pages are a heading, a paragraph of general description, and a list of bullet points naming components of the work.

Each bullet is accurate. Together they describe the service from the inside, in the terms of somebody who performs it.

The reader is on the outside. They have a problem, not a specification, and they are trying to work out whether you solve it.

What the reader is actually deciding

• Does this apply to my situation?
• What actually happens if I go ahead?
• How long does it take and how disruptive is it?
• Roughly what does it cost?
• What do I have to do?
• What happens if something goes wrong?

A feature list answers none of those. It answers what is included, which is the question you would ask if you had already decided.

The order that works

Start with the situation the reader is in, in their words. Somebody who recognises their own problem in the first sentence keeps reading.

Then what you do about it, in outcome terms rather than component terms.

Then what actually happens: the sequence, the timescale, what they need to do, what you need from them.

Then the price, or a range with what moves it.

Then the specifics, which is where the feature list finally belongs, for the reader who has decided and now wants detail.

A worked example

An insulation contractor's attic page, originally a paragraph about energy efficiency followed by nine bullets naming materials and standards.

The rewrite opened with the situation: an upstairs that is cold in winter and hot in summer, and a heating bill that has been climbing.

Then what happens: a visit to look and measure, a written quote within two days, a job that takes most of one day, and no need to be home if arrangements are made.

Then a price range for a typical house of a stated size, with the two things that move it.

Then the materials and standards, kept as the list, at the bottom.

Same information, reordered. Enquiries from the page rose noticeably, and more of them arrived already knowing roughly what it would cost, which shortened every conversation.

Writing the what happens section

The part that is most often missing and easiest to write, because you do it every week.

Describe the actual sequence. Somebody phones, you visit within a few days, you send a quote, they accept, you order materials, you attend on an agreed date, the work takes so long, you clean up, you invoice.

That is unglamorous and it is exactly what somebody hiring a trade for the first time wants to know, because they have no idea how any of it works.

It also quietly demonstrates competence. A business that can describe its own process clearly reads as one that has a process.

The counter-case

Where a feature list is the right format.

Comparing tiers, where the reader is choosing between your own options and needs to see what differs.

Technical products bought by people who know the category, where the specification is genuinely the decision.

And regulatory or safety information, where completeness matters more than readability and a list is the clearest form.

The distinction is whether the reader has already decided to buy the category. If they have, specifications help. If they are still deciding, they do not.

Price, and the reluctance to publish it

The most common omission and the most costly.

The objection is that every job differs, which is true and is not an answer. A range with an explanation of what moves it is honest and useful.

What happens without it: the reader has to phone to find out, and most will not. The ones who do include people whose budget is nowhere near, which wastes both parties' time.

Publishing a range filters both ways. It loses the enquiries you would have declined and gains the ones who now know you are in their bracket.

What to cut

The material that fills service pages and does nothing.

General statements about the importance of the service. Anybody reading the page already believes it matters.

Claims about quality and professionalism, which every competitor makes identically.

Industry background, unless it changes a decision the reader is making.

And any sentence that would be equally true on a competitor's page, which is the same test that applies everywhere else.

One page per service

Worth stating because it affects how any of this is written.

A single page covering six services cannot answer the six questions for any of them, and it cannot match what somebody searched for.

Separate pages, each doing this properly, work better for readers and for search. It is more writing, and it is the same total writing distributed usefully.

Start with the service you most want more of rather than doing all six badly at once.

Where the words come from

The practical objection to all of this is that writing six service pages properly is a lot of writing.

It is, and most of it already exists in spoken form. You explain this service on the phone several times a week.

The efficient method is to record yourself answering the six questions out loud, as though a customer had asked, and then tidy the transcript. Twenty minutes of talking produces most of a page.

It also produces better material than writing, because spoken explanation naturally starts with the customer's situation and uses the words they use.

What it needs afterwards is structure and cutting, which is a different and much easier task than starting from nothing.

Checking your own

1. Read the first paragraph and ask whether it describes a customer's situation or your capability.
2. Count how many of the six questions are answered.
3. Look for the sequence, and add it if it is missing.
4. Find the price or the reason there is none.
5. Delete any sentence a competitor could use unchanged.

The last usually removes a third of the page, and the page reads better for it. Nobody has ever complained that a service page was too specific.

How the page holds a stranger who arrived from a search is covered in writing the page somebody landed on.

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.