Why Your Services Page Reads Like Everybody Else’s
If your services page reads generic, one test proves it. Copy your services page. Paste it onto your closest competitor’s website in your head.
Does anything break?
If nothing breaks, your services page reads generic, and it is occupying the part of your site where somebody decides whether to contact you.
What Generic Actually Sounds Like
You have read these on every Kenyan business site.
We offer a comprehensive range of solutions tailored to meet your unique needs.
Our team of experienced professionals delivers quality service you can rely on.
We pride ourselves on excellence, integrity and customer satisfaction.
Each transfers to any business in any sector without a single edit. That is the proof they carry no information. A visitor reading them learns nothing, feels nothing, and leaves.
Three Reasons It Happens
Writing about yourself is hard, so people reach for phrases that sound professional.
The service feels obvious to you. You have explained it a thousand times verbally and assume the page conveys the same thing.
Somebody copied a competitor who had copied somebody else. A services page reads generic partly because the whole market is quoting itself.
Fixing a Services Page That Reads Generic
Because services describe what you do. Problems describe what the reader is living with.
Generic: Bookkeeping services for small and medium enterprises.
Specific: For businesses whose records are eight months behind and who need to file without a panic.
The second one is recognisable. Somebody in that situation knows immediately that the page is about them.
When a Services Page Reads Generic, Name the Exclusions
Moreover, nothing signals specificity faster than an exclusion.
Stating that you work with businesses of a certain size, or that you do not take a particular kind of job, makes everything else more credible. A page that welcomes everybody reads as a page written by somebody with no clients.
Fix Three: Describe the Actual Work
However, most services pages describe outcomes and skip the mechanics.
Explain what happens. How many visits. What you will need from them. How long it takes. What they receive at the end. Who does the work.
A services page reads generic largely because it never describes a single concrete step, and concrete steps are what let somebody picture the engagement.
Fix Four: Put a Number on It
A price, a range, a starting figure, or a duration.
Numbers are the fastest cure for generic writing because they cannot be transferred to a competitor. Our post on what a missing price costs covers the wider argument.
Fix Five: One Page Per Service
A single page listing nine services well is worse than nine pages each covering one.
Somebody searching a specific problem needs a page about that problem, not a list containing it. Separate pages also rank individually, which a combined page cannot.
Our post on choosing keywords without tools covers finding the terms each page should answer.
Rewrite One Page This Week
Take your most commercially important service.
Write down what a client actually says when they call about it, in their words. Then describe what you do, step by step. Add what it costs, or what it starts at. Finally, name who it does not suit.
Then assemble that. Run the paste test again. If it still transfers to a competitor, you have described the category rather than yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my services page reads generic? The paste test. If it works on a competitor’s site unchanged, it is generic.
Is professional-sounding language bad? Only when it replaces information. Plain and specific outperforms formal and vague.
How long should a service page be? Long enough to describe the work, the process, the cost basis and who it suits.
Should I mention competitors? No. Describe yourself specifically instead.
What if my service really is the same as everybody’s? Then differentiate on process, speed, price transparency, or who you serve.
How many services pages do I need? One per service you want to be found for.
Run the Paste Test
If your services page reads generic, the fix is not better adjectives. It is naming a problem, describing the work, and putting a number on it.
At Africa Web Experts we pull service copy out of how you already describe the work aloud. From KES 65,000, live in seventy two hours.
