Headlines That Say What the Page Is

Headlines that could belong to anyone

Excellence in every detail. Your vision, our passion. Where quality meets value. Built on trust since 1994.

Each of those could be the main heading on a small business home page, set large across a photograph. None of them says whether the business fixes furnaces, sells furniture or prepares tax returns.

A visitor arriving from a search or an ad has to scroll, open the menu or read the small print to find out where they have landed. Some will. Plenty will press back first.

What a visitor is checking

In the first few seconds on a page, a visitor is not reading. They are checking whether they are in the right place.

They want to know whether this business does what they need, whether it does it where they are, and whether it serves people like them. The biggest text on the page is read first, so it should answer them.

A slogan answers none of that. It hands the work to the visitor, who has two other tabs open where somebody else may have done it for them.

What a plain headline names

• The service, in the words customers use for it.
• The place, when customers choose by location.
• The customer, if you serve one kind in particular.
• One benefit, concrete enough to check.

The first is the one most often wrong. Businesses describe themselves in their trade's vocabulary, while customers search and scan in their own.

Customers' words, not the trade's

A building envelope specialist fixes what owners call leaky windows and water getting in. A hardscape contractor builds patios and retaining walls. A mechanical contractor, to a homeowner, installs furnaces.

The trade term is accurate, and it belongs on the page. But the headline should use the phrase a customer would type into a search box or say to a neighbour.

If you are unsure which words those are, listen to how callers describe the job, or read the questions that arrive through the contact form.

Search Console helps too. Its Performance report lists the phrases people searched before reaching each page, which is the customer's vocabulary rather than the trade's.

A benefit a visitor can check

The smaller line under the headline is where the benefit goes, and it is where vague words creep back in.

Quality service, competitive prices and customer satisfaction are claims every competitor makes. Nobody can check them, so nobody weighs them.

Same-week appointments, written estimates, open Saturdays or a technician who phones before arriving are facts. A visitor can hold you to them, which is why they persuade, and why they must be true every week.

A worked example

A crane rental company in Abbotsford had a home page headline reading "Reaching new heights", across a photograph of a city skyline at dusk.

Visitors could not tell whether it rented cranes, built towers or washed their windows. The services appeared halfway down the page, under a "What we do" heading.

Its customers were mostly roofers, sign installers and small builders needing a crane and an operator for a day, and most found it by searching for crane rental nearby.

The heading became "Crane rental with operators in Abbotsford and the Fraser Valley". A smaller line beneath it said "Booked by the hour or the day, with a site visit before any difficult lift." The slogan moved beside the logo.

The page did not get longer or fancier. It simply said what the company did, in the place every visitor looks first.

Where the tagline goes

None of this means throwing the slogan away. Many businesses are attached to theirs, and some are genuinely good.

It means demoting it. Set it as a smaller line near the logo, on the about page or at the foot of the page, where it adds personality without being asked to explain the business.

The headline does the explaining. The tagline adds the tone.

Every page, not only the home page

Visitors often arrive on inner pages straight from search, so each page needs its own plain heading.

A service page headed "Our Services" or "Solutions" makes a visitor read on to discover which service it is. One headed "Drain cleaning in Coquitlam and Port Moody" tells them at once.

Each page should have one main heading, coded as the page's top-level heading, with smaller headings below it for each section. That structure helps screen readers and search engines as much as it helps people scanning.

The heading and the page title

The heading visitors see on the page and the page title shown in search results and browser tabs are two different things, and both deserve plain words.

The title is often the first thing a searcher reads, as the blue link in the results. Google cuts long titles short, so put the service and place first and the business name after them.

The two need not match word for word. They should describe the same page.

Many sites carry the same title on every page, often just the business name, because nobody ever changed the default. Each page deserves its own.

Testing a headline

Two quick tests settle more than any discussion about wording.

Show the page on a phone, for five seconds, to someone who does not know the business, then ask what it does and where. If they cannot say, the headline is not doing its job.

Then ask whether a competitor could use the same headline unchanged. If one could, it says nothing about you.

The counter-case

Some businesses can carry a slogan as a headline.

A business name that already includes the trade and the town leaves the headline free to do something else.

A well-known local brand may not need to explain itself to most visitors, and a campaign page might reasonably lead with its offer.

Even then, the service should appear somewhere in the first screen, in plain words. Name the service, the place and one real benefit, and let the slogan be the smaller line.

Rewriting it

1. Read your headline as a stranger would.
2. Name the service in customers' words.
3. Add the place if customers choose by it.
4. Add one concrete benefit as a smaller line.
5. Move the slogan beside the logo.
6. Repeat it for every service page.
7. Check the page title describes the same thing.

Step two is where most rewrites succeed or fail. A headline in the trade's vocabulary is accurate and still invisible to a customer who has never heard the term.

The same plain approach applied to the people behind the business is covered in team bios written by the team.

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.