What Your Site Says You Do

Accurate and incomprehensible are compatible

A site can contain no false statements at all and still leave every reader unsure what you sell.

This is the harder failure, because there is nothing to correct. Every sentence survives scrutiny individually, and the page as a whole communicates almost nothing.

Checking whether your content is true is one exercise. Checking whether it is understood is a different one, and it is the one almost nobody runs.

What a stranger actually takes away

Far less than you would like, and much faster than you would like.

A first-time visitor gives a page a few seconds, reads the largest text and perhaps one subheading, and forms a rough hypothesis about what the business is.

Everything after that is them checking the hypothesis rather than building it.

Which means the sentence in the biggest type is doing most of the work, and on a large number of business sites that sentence is a slogan rather than a description.

The test

Find somebody who does not work in your industry and has not seen your site.

Show them the homepage for five seconds, close it, and ask two questions: what does this business do, and who is it for.

Write down their exact words rather than your interpretation of them.

Do this with four or five people. The pattern in their answers is the most useful piece of marketing information most small businesses can obtain for free, and it usually takes an afternoon.

The words that cause the trouble

• Solutions, which can precede absolutely anything.
• Services, used as a category rather than a list.
• Partner, when what is meant is supplier.
• Bespoke and tailored, which describe how rather than what.
• Industry-leading, which every competitor also claims.
• Internal product names nobody outside recognises.

None is wrong. Each is empty, and a sentence built from several of them can be read carefully twice and still not identify the trade.

Why businesses write this way

Not carelessness. Two understandable pressures.

The first is fear of narrowing. Naming precisely what you do feels like turning away everything you have not named, so the description broadens until it excludes nothing and describes nothing.

The second is proximity. After a decade in a field, the specific terms feel childishly obvious and the abstract ones feel professional, so the writing drifts upward in generality with every revision.

Both produce the same result, which is a page that says a great deal about how you work and nothing about what you make or fix.

The homepage sentence

One plain sentence near the top, naming the thing and the customer, in the words a customer would use.

Commercial refrigeration repair for restaurants and grocers across the Lower Mainland is not elegant and it is unambiguous.

Total facility solutions for the hospitality sector is more polished and tells a reader nothing they could act on.

The plain version costs you nothing except the feeling that you have been reductive about a business you know to be complex.

A worked example

An engineering firm ran the five-second test with six people from outside their field.

Their homepage headline described delivering integrated project outcomes for the built environment.

Of the six, two guessed construction, one guessed architecture, one guessed property development, one guessed a recruitment agency, and one said they had no idea.

The firm did structural inspections of existing buildings, which nobody guessed and which they had been doing for nineteen years.

They replaced the headline with a sentence naming structural inspections and the two kinds of client who buy them.

Repeating the test with five different people produced five correct answers.

Nothing else on the site changed, and enquiries that arrived already understanding what was being bought rose noticeably over the following quarter.

Check the service names too

The same problem appears one level down, in the navigation and the service page titles.

Internal names leak outward: a menu item that made sense in a planning meeting, an acronym, a bundled offering with a name you invented.

A visitor scanning a menu is deciding which item is the one they need, and an invented name forces them to click and find out, which many will not do.

Name each page after the thing a customer would type or ask for, and keep the clever name for the proposal document if you want it.

Compare the site against what you actually sell

A useful cross-check, and it takes ten minutes.

List your last twenty jobs and what each one was. Then look at how much of your website is devoted to each category.

The mismatch is often severe: the work that pays the bills gets a paragraph, and something you do twice a year has its own section because it was interesting to write about.

The site should be weighted roughly the way the business is, and where you want it to go, rather than by which topics were easiest to produce copy for.

The counter-case

Precision can be taken too far, and there are businesses for whom breadth is genuinely the offer.

A general contractor, a full-service accountant, or a supplier whose value is carrying everything cannot honestly name one thing, and pretending otherwise misrepresents them.

But breadth still has to be shown rather than asserted. The answer is a specific list, visible immediately, rather than an abstract word that covers the list without naming any of it.

Nine named services communicate range. The phrase full-service solutions communicates nothing, and the reader cannot tell whether it hides nine services or two.

The exercise

1. Show the homepage to five outsiders for five seconds.
2. Ask what it does and who it is for.
3. Record their words exactly.
4. Compare to what you actually sell.
5. Rewrite the top sentence to name the thing and the customer.
6. Rename any service page a customer would not search for.
7. Run the test again with different people.

The final step is what makes it worth doing, because a rewrite that has not been retested is still only your opinion of your own clarity.

Naming is half the battle, covered in naming services the way customers do.

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.