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A potential customer has landed on your website, and your home page has so far convinced them enough that they like the vibe of your company. But your site’s job is not done yet. Before they decide if you’re the right business for the job, your customer will click through to your service descriptions to make sure that what you offer fits with what they’re looking for.
This page offers a critical opportunity to convert a visitor into a customer. How you present your services could be the clincher between someone picking up the phone, and someone clicking away.
So, how do you present your services in a way that connects with the people that you really want to work with?
Here are 9 tips to consider when writing service descriptions for your website:
1. Understand your customers
Before you even start to create content for your website, you should consider who your buyer personas are. Think about what their motivations are, what problems they are trying to resolve, what their objections to purchase might be and what exactly it is that will make them choose you. HubSpot offers you a great template to organise your customer research and create your own buyer personas. You can then use these buyer persona outlines to inform the writing of your service descriptions to ensure they are completely customer-centric.
2. Features vs benefits
Create a list of the features of your services and then list how they transfer to benefits. A benefit might be something that you help customers achieve, or something negative that you can help them avoid. In other words, how is your service going to make the customer feel, or what are they going to gain? Think about how your service makes their life better, easier, more cost-efficient or more enjoyable and use these ideas to make your text more enticing.
For example, if you’re a copywriter, the features of what you do might be blog writing, on-page SEO, online articles etc. But, the benefits of these activities for your client would be increased web traffic, increased credibility, better search engine results... Get the idea?
3. Connect with customer pain point
Using the information about your personas, identify your customers’ key pain points and how your services will help them overcome these concerns. This will help you create a more persuasive pitch as readers will quickly relate to how your service is the solution they need.
Speak directly to the reader. Engage with them by shifting the focus on to them, rather than your company. Use sentences that feature ‘you’ and ‘your’ rather than ‘we’, ‘I’ or ‘us’.
4. Use bullet points and subheadings
We already know that visitors scan web pages, so to ensure that your readers are picking up all the key info, present your services in an easy-to-consume format. Do this by:
- using subheadings to separate out text - readers will scan these to find information relevant to them and then read the information under these headings.
- using bullet points to include key information without them getting lost in the depths of a paragraph.
- using whitespace to guide readers through the page and ensure they’re not overwhelmed by blocks of text.
5. Avoid industry jargon
Remember that not everyone knows your industry as well as you do. Use terminology that your customers would use naturally to describe what they need, not necessarily what you would consider the ‘correct’ terms to be - this is also what they’ll be entering in search engines. Keep things simple; readers don’t need to know the ins and outs or technicalities of how you work, just that you’re going to achieve the outcome they’re looking for.
6. Provide specifics
How many times have you read the words ‘leading [provider]’ or ‘your city’s best [service provider]’? According to who, exactly? Read over your descriptions and highlight any generic sounding phrases. What can you say instead that presents a more tangible and credible offering? Use factual deliverables and chop out the fluffy marketing speak. For example:
- Instead of saying ‘efficient service and fast turnaround times’ you could say ‘All enquiries answered within 24-hours’.
- Instead of saying ‘We help our customers do X, Y and Z’, say ‘For # years we’ve helped over # companies achieve $## in additional revenue’.
Much more convincing!
7. Consider creating a page per service
If you’re focusing on boosting your SEO, consider creating a page on your website for each of your services. This gives you the opportunity to customise the URL, page title, headings and target specific keywords on each page, so you’re more likely to appear in search engine results for those terms.
8. Include a testimonial or case study
Consider including a quote or brief testimonial from customers who have already benefited from your services. This gives your leads insight into real-world examples of what you can help them achieve, and social proof that you can in fact do what you say.
9. To price or not to price?
There are several things to consider when it comes to displaying your pricing on your website, and ultimately it comes down to your preference and what works for your pricing model. Many people value the transparency of including pricing upfront, and it also helps you in that it eliminates those who are not committed to the financial investment straight away. However, we know that pricing can be a fickle beast, and it’s not always practical to display definitive costings, or you simply may not wish to disclose this information to customers and competitors. Either way, make it super easy for prospects to contact you on your service page in order to find out more information by including clear contact details on your services page.
Remember to treat your product descriptions like a sales pitch - after all, this could be your first touch point with a lead, so what do you want them to think about your business? What would you say to them in a face-to-face meeting to persuade them to use your services? Have you included that here on your website?
Did you find it a challenge to write your service descriptions? If you have some more tips, share them below.
