Someone lands on your homepage with a question already in their head. Can this lot fix my problem?
Most homepages answer a different one. What does this business do?
The gap between those two questions is where a lot of work goes missing.
The question you answer by accident
Left alone, every business writes about itself. What it does. How long it has been going. How it works. All true, all fair enough, and none of it what the visitor came for.
They are not being nosy about you. They are trying to settle one thing. Have you done this before, for someone like me?
Why it is so hard to spot in your own site
You know your business too well, and you cannot un-know it. The things that would tell a stranger you are the right choice look so obvious to you that they get left out.
It is the same reason nobody can proofread their own writing.
What belongs there instead
Who you are for. Not everyone. The kind of person or business you are actually best for.
The problem you fix, in their words rather than yours.
Something that shows you have fixed it before for someone like them.
What happens next, and what it takes to find out.
Four things. Most homepages we look at have none of them near the top.
The commonest version opens with something like delivering excellence since 1998, then lists nine services in a row, all the same size. Every word is true. None of it helps anyone choose.
A test that takes five minutes
Show your homepage to someone who does not work in your trade. Give them ten seconds, then take it away.
Ask them what you do and who you do it for.
If they cannot say it back, your visitors cannot either. The difference is that they will not tell you. They will just go and look at the next one.
This is not about better words
Clever writing aimed at the wrong question still misses. You do not need a better turn of phrase. You need to answer the thing they turned up wanting to know, in the plainest words you have.
Do that and the rest of the page gets easier to write, because you finally know what it is for.
