Somebody searched, tapped a result, and landed on your page. They are standing in a car park, or on a sofa with the television on. They will give the page about five seconds before deciding whether to read on or go back and try the next result.
The headline is what they spend those seconds on. It is the most valuable sentence on the site, and on most small business sites it is the least considered one.
The job it has to do
A headline has to answer three questions at once, and it has about eight words to do it in.
What is this. Not what industry you are in. What the thing on this page is.
Is it for me. A roofer in Panama City and a roofer working the Tyndall rebuild are answering different people. The headline is where you sort them.
Why you and not the next result. Something that would be false if a competitor pasted it onto their own site.
Most headlines answer none of the three. “Welcome to our website” answers nothing. “Quality service since 1998” answers the first one badly and the other two not at all.
Six ways they usually fail
It describes the company instead of the reader. “A family-run business built on trust” tells the visitor about you. They did not come to learn about you; they came with a problem. Turn it round: what is true about their situation.
It is a category, not a claim. “Commercial Plumbing” is a label. It belongs in the navigation, not in the largest type on the page. A heading that only names the category wastes the one line people definitely read.
It could belong to anyone. Read it out loud, then imagine your nearest competitor’s logo above it. If nothing looks wrong, it is not a headline, it is wallpaper. This is the single most useful test, and it kills most of what gets written.
It is a pun. “We’ve got you covered” on a roofing site. Everyone in the trade has already used it. A pun costs you the one line you had to say something real.
It hedges. “Solutions tailored to your needs” is what you write when you have not decided who the page is for. Deciding is the work. A headline that speaks to everyone speaks to nobody, and the page behind it usually has the same problem.
It is written for a search engine. Stuffing the town and the service and the word “best” into one line produces something no person would say. Search engines got good at detecting that years ago, and a page that reads badly now has a ranking problem as well as a conversion problem.
What to do instead
Say the thing you would say if the person were standing in front of you and had thirty seconds.
A pest control company in Tallahassee does not need “Comprehensive Pest Management Solutions.” They need something closer to what they would actually say: we get rid of it, and we come back for free if it returns. That is a specific, checkable promise, and it is one their competitor cannot copy without also making the promise.
The pattern that works most often is plain: the outcome, plus the thing that makes it credible.
- A website your staff can update, built in eight weeks.
- Emergency electrical, answered by the person who will be doing the work.
- Bookkeeping for contractors, so the year end is not a fortnight of panic.
None of those are clever. Clever is not the goal. Being unmistakably about one thing is the goal.
The subhead does the rest
The headline gets them to stop. The line under it gets them to keep going, and that is where the qualifying detail belongs: the towns you cover, the size of job you take, the price shape.
Splitting the work across two lines is what lets the headline stay short. Trying to fit the qualification into the headline itself is how you end up with twenty-two words nobody reads.
Test it the cheap way
Show the top of the page to somebody who does not know the business. Give them five seconds, then take it away and ask what the company does and whether it is for someone like them.
If they cannot answer, the problem is not the design, the photograph or the button color. It is the sentence.
