3 minute read
Hey, it's Jordan.
Friday morning we sent a batch of notes to Tampa Bay business owners about their websites. Before writing each one, we read their site top to bottom the way a stranger would. One of them did something I haven't stopped thinking about since.
It did math against itself.
The gap of the week
The banner at the top of the page celebrated three decades of serving Tampa Bay. A paragraph further down the same page said "over 20 years." Both lines were written proudly. Only one of them is still true.
Here's what happened, because it happens everywhere. Somebody wrote that paragraph about a decade ago, and it was accurate the day it shipped. Then the business kept going. New clients, new people, new milestones. The website didn't go anywhere. Nobody inside ever reread it, because nobody inside reads their own website. Why would you? You already know who you are.
But a prospect doing homework reads every line. And when a page disagrees with itself, they do the same math I did. For a firm whose whole product is getting the details right, one stale sentence whispers exactly the wrong thing.
The fix costs nothing:
Before: "serving local businesses for over 20 years"
After: "three decades of Tampa Bay businesses have trusted us with this, and counting"
Ten minutes of work. A decade of credibility back on the page.
Steal this: the five-minute numbers audit
Say these out loud, then go find them on your website:
Years in business
Team size
Locations or service area
Anything you count: clients served, projects completed, reviews
If the site's numbers and your numbers disagree anywhere, your website is describing an earlier version of your business. Fix the numbers today. Then ask yourself what else froze at the last redesign.
Talk soon,
Jordan
P.S. If the audit made you wince, the numbers are usually the smallest part of the gap. Our Three-Gap Diagnostic reads your whole site and gives you the full picture in about 90 seconds. And I'm genuinely curious: when did you last read your own homepage, start to finish? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.