Why your technically accurate messaging is leaving people confused.
I've read plenty of website copy that was perfectly accurate and still left me wondering what the company actually wanted me to understand.
The terminology was correct. The product descriptions were thorough. Every claim appeared to have been carefully considered. And yet, I still had questions.
This happens especially easily in businesses with specialized offerings. The people responsible for explaining the products know them so well that they can forget how much background knowledge they're bringing to the page. I wouldn’t call the resulting copy bad. Sometimes it's good information presented without enough context to make it useful.
Insiders know what outsiders don’t
The owners and employees of a business understand its terminology, product relationships, distinctions and history different than a buyer does, and that can be a real handicap when organizing offerings in a limited amount of space, like a website or ad.
One of the most prevalent examples I have seen recently would be owners forgetting to include specifics about how to buy, or how to begin an engagement with a service provider. Shopping online these days is a little like traveling from hotel to hotel and being the kind of person who never “gets” the shower faucet on the first try. Hotels assume we’ll know, but wouldn’t it be nice to have clearer instructions on how to get hot water, cold water, and transition from bath to standing shower mode, and not have to guess? It wouldn’t have to be much bigger than the signage telling us how green the hotel is, or where to leave the towels you want washed.
That’s how I feel about copy on company websites. Why stand in the way of someone knowing how to check out?
Accurate information isn't the same as useful information
By now, we’re past the point of tolerating fluffy, additional language, unless it belongs. On most websites and ads, it won’t. We need useful information relevant to buying, like the capabilities and potential outcomes of the thing we’re buying, technical specs, who it’s suited to, what problem it addresses, and how someone might evaluate it against the alternatives, including the price. The aim is to make all of that information easy to navigate. Information should hit people where they are in the journey. Ready to buy? Have the info right there, not at the end of a journey through the About and How To pages.
When website copy is "accurate" but confusing, it usually suffers from two diagnosable pitfalls:
Feature Focus Over Benefit Focus: Listing what a service does technically rather than explaining the specific, tangible outcome it delivers to the client.
Cognitive Overload: Requiring the reader to work too hard to figure out what value is being offered or what action they need to take.
The questions your website doesn't answer
The solution is to diagnose your marketing, before investing time and money into a complete rewrite. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes to understand how they are being served by your messaging. Better yet, do real market research out in the world. Ask the questions a person might have that the company hasn't thought to answer.
Are the offerings differentiated?
Is the intended audience obvious?
Does each page have an importance?
Is the CTA appropriate for someone at that stage of consideration?
And, if I am ready to buy, what exactly am I supposed to do?
Sometimes the missing piece is a sentence explaining who a service is for. Sometimes it's a comparison between two offerings. Sometimes it's a clearer link, a better-labelled button or a brief explanation of what happens after someone makes an enquiry. The information may already exist somewhere within the business. It just hasn't made its way to the person who needs it.
And that brings us back to the difference between being accurate and being useful.
Your experts might be too close to the subject
I have tremendous respect for the people who develop specialized products and services. Their expertise is what makes accurate communication possible in the first place. But familiarity can make it difficult to recognize which details need explaining.
If you've spent years developing a product, you may not remember which questions you had when you first encountered the technology. If you work with a particular service every day, its terminology and processes probably feel perfectly intuitive. Your customers don't necessarily share that familiarity. This is where a fresh editorial perspective can help. Not to replace the experts, simplify away important details or question information that's already correct, but to identify what a reader still needs to understand. Because the goal isn't simply to make sure everything on your website is true. It's to make that information useful to someone trying to make a decision.
What might your website be assuming?
When you're close to a business, the gaps in its messaging aren't always obvious.
I review existing website messaging to identify what's clear, what's confusing and what deserves attention before anyone starts rewriting.