Saying What You Do in Six Words

The line everybody reads

Under the logo, at the top of the homepage, in the search result, on the van and in the email signature. It is the most-read text the business owns.

It is also usually written last, in five minutes, by somebody who has run out of energy.

Which is how businesses end up with a line that could belong to anybody in their category, or worse, to anybody in any category.

What the line has to do

One job: let a stranger place you within two seconds.

Not persuade them. Not differentiate you. Place you. What kind of business is this, roughly what does it do, and does it apply to me.

Persuasion comes afterwards and only works once the category is established. A promise about quality means nothing until the reader knows quality of what.

The lines that fail

• Quality you can trust. True of every business, claimed by every business.
• Your partner in success. Says nothing about the trade at all.
• Excellence since 1998. Excellence at what.
• Solutions for modern business. Which solutions, which business.
• Where quality meets value. A place, apparently.

Each of these is grammatically fine and informationally empty. The test is whether a competitor could use the same line without changing a word. If they could, it is not doing anything.

The formula that works

Unfashionable and reliable: what you do, for whom, where.

Residential electrical work across the North Shore. Bookkeeping for small trades in Surrey. Custom cabinetry for kitchens and bathrooms, Fraser Valley.

None of those is clever. All of them let a stranger decide in two seconds whether to keep reading, which is the entire job.

The cleverness, if you want it, belongs in the sentence underneath. That one can carry the promise, once the reader knows what is being promised.

A worked example

A landscaping business whose homepage line was "Transforming outdoor spaces since 2006".

It reads well. It also does not say whether they do lawn maintenance or hard landscaping, whether they serve homes or businesses, or where they work.

Three quarters of their revenue was patios and retaining walls, and most of their enquiries were people wanting weekly mowing, which they had stopped offering.

The new line was "Patios, retaining walls and hard landscaping, Fraser Valley".

Enquiry volume dropped and enquiry quality rose sharply. They lost the mowing enquiries they were declining anyway and gained conversations about the work they wanted.

The owner's initial objection was that it sounded plain. It did. It also described the business, which the previous line had not.

The counter-case

Where a plain descriptive line is the wrong choice.

A business whose name already states the category does not need to repeat it. If you trade as something Plumbing, the line beneath can do a different job, such as stating the area or the specialism.

A well-known local business, where most visitors already know what you do, can use the line for something else. Recognition changes what the reader needs.

And a business deliberately repositioning may want a line that describes where it is going rather than where it has been, accepting some confusion in exchange.

Those are real exceptions. They are also much rarer than the number of businesses that believe they are one.

Six words against twelve

The count in the title is a target rather than a rule, and shorter is not automatically better.

Below about five words you start dropping information the reader needs. Above about twelve it stops being a line and becomes a sentence, which is fine on a page and poor on a van.

The practical range is six to ten. Enough for the trade, the customer type and the area, which is three pieces of information.

If you cannot fit all three, drop the customer type first. Trade and area are what a stranger needs; who you serve is usually implied by the trade.

Where the line appears

1. Under the logo on every page.
2. In the page title, which is what shows in search results.
3. In the listing description.
4. On the van, where it has two seconds at a traffic light.
5. In the email signature.
6. On the business card, under the name.

The fourth deserves attention because it has the harshest constraints. A line that works at forty kilometres an hour will work everywhere else.

Writing yours

A short exercise rather than a brainstorm.

Write down the three services you most want more of. Write down who buys them. Write down where. Then combine those into one line of under ten words, using the plainest available term for each.

Read it to somebody who does not know your business and ask what you do. If they can answer, it works.

If they hesitate, the problem is usually a word you chose because it sounded better than the obvious one.

The words to avoid

Not because they are forbidden, but because they carry no information.

Solutions, services, quality, professional, trusted, leading, premier, comprehensive, bespoke, and anything ending in innovation.

Each is a word businesses reach for when they want to sound established. None tells a reader anything, because no business claims the opposite.

Removing them usually shortens the line and forces a specific in their place, which is the improvement.

The sentence underneath

Once the category line is doing its job, a second line has room to be interesting.

That one can carry the thing you are actually better at: same-week appointments, twenty years on the same street, work guaranteed for a decade, or the specific problem you solve that competitors avoid.

It should be a claim you could support if challenged, which rules out most of what businesses put there.

Two lines working together — what you do, then why you rather than somebody else — do more than one line trying to achieve both and achieving neither.

The order matters. Category first, always, because a stranger cannot evaluate a promise about something they have not yet identified.

Testing it properly

Two checks, both quick.

Cover your logo and read the line. Could it belong to a competitor. If yes, rewrite.

Show it to three people outside your trade and ask what the business does. If any of them is wrong, the line is not working, whatever you meant it to say.

How the rest of the page follows from that line 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.