3 Takeaways Ep. 10 – Should You Lead With Services On Your Site?

Kicking things off, a question has come up a fair amount from agencies-our clients and agencies we’re talking to, thinking about coming on board-and they’re asking, should you lead with services on your site?

Should we list our capabilities or our services on the prime real estate of our site, above the fold, or around there?

And more specifically, in our work or case studies section, should we group our work by services, rather than category? The initial, general answer is, you should talk your services, somewhere on your site, but the question of where is important.

First, let’s get one important piece out of the way-if you’re a horizontally-positioned firm-say, you’re a content-creation firm that cuts across multiple verticals (which we talk about, incidentally in episode 5 of our series),

this video doesn’t apply as directly to you, because your service is the focal point.  Still some tips you’ll want to see though-don’t leave yet.

So what we see with agency sites, quite often, is a home page with name, brief description, corresponding images, and then what we see a lot of in the immediate scroll down will look like a variation of this.

Where it lays out the capes-media planning, strategy, design, etc., and aesthetically and structurally, nothing wrong with this on its face, but think about it-that’s the first thing you want prospects seeing?

I completely understand the desire to put services more or less front and center, so it’s quite clear what you do and what you provide.

While I understand it, you shouldn’t do it, not that quickly. Okay Lee, then how should it be organized?

I’ll get to that, but for today’s three takeaways, I want to get into the reasons why you shouldn’t do that first.

Your first takeaway: Why you shouldn’t lead with services on your site-a lot of you watching have a service offering that’s not easily explained within the site’s real-estate and it might actually undermine a prospect’s understanding. If a prospect doesn’t get you or your offering, that’s obviously a problem.

Your second takeaway is this: You have a very limited amount of time to capture and keep your prospect’s attention.

Your website immediately paints a picture of the agency.

Conversely to the first takeaway, many of you watching have a clear and understandable suite of services, but you have quite a few of those services.

And putting them all on a page with no context upfront as to your expertise, does you no favors. And so that piggybacks on to the final takeaway:  Listing all your services, especially as one of the first things a prospect sees, makes you look like every other firm that has similar services and could even commoditize your offering in the prospect’s eyes.

So what should you do?

Well, I don’t need to tell you we’re in a service business, we had a client say recently, it’s like selling pixie dust.

It’s hard to differentiate your firm from the competition.

But instead of that list of services upfront, replace it with the business problems you solve, specifically for what companies and in what verticals.

That should be 2-3 short paragraphs to start, you don’t want to have a ton of copy that early on your site.

By doing that, you establish expertise right upfront, and then you can follow with the services that back up that expertise.

And there was a second question, in your work or case studies section, should you group work by service, rather that category?

The answer is you can do both, but lead with category first, ideally.

Obviously a lot of ways to accomplish that from a site design standpoint, but don’t categorize your work by service-only, it doesn’t have the impact it should.