Industry pages

What an industry page is

An industry page is your service described again for buyers in one trade, using the words that trade uses, the situations it recognises, the rules it works under and the objections its people raise. A dental practice, a machine shop and a law firm may buy the same bookkeeping service, but they do not describe the problem in the same language.

It is not the general page with the trade's name substituted into the headline. That version is worse than having no page at all. A reader in the trade sees within two sentences that nothing on the page came from anyone who has been inside a business like theirs, and what they conclude is not "this is generic" but "this supplier does not know my work". A general service page that claims no specialism is more honest and sells better.

When you need one

You need one when a meaningful share of your revenue comes from a single trade and your website does not say so. If a quarter of your clients are veterinary practices and the site says "small businesses", every vet who lands there has to do the translating themselves, and some of them will not bother.

You need one when a trade has rules that change the job. Anything under a regulator, a licensing body, a privacy regime or a provincial inspection regime buys differently, because the first question is not what it costs but whether you have done it inside those rules before.

You do not need one for a trade where you have one client and no strong feelings. Two industry pages written from real experience beat eight written from imagination. And if your problem is that the general page is weak, fix that first with a rewrite of the page you have; an industry page built on a poor general page inherits the poor part.

What goes in it

Three things have to be in it that are not on the general page, and if you cannot supply all three, the page should not be written.

• The vocabulary. What that trade calls the thing. Chart notes, not records. Job numbers, not projects. Practitioners, matters, units, loads, runs. Using the wrong noun once is enough to lose a reader who uses the right one daily.
• The rules. The regulation, standard or professional obligation that shapes the work, named accurately and kept current. In Canada that is often a provincial college, a privacy statute or an inspection body, and the buyer knows which.
• The objections of that trade. Every trade has two or three doubts that no other trade has. Clinics ask about patient information. Manufacturers ask about downtime. Firms with partners ask who signs off. These come from your sales calls or from asking their buyers directly, not from guesswork.
• Proof from inside it. One named customer in the trade, or a piece of work described with permission. A page for an industry with no evidence you have worked in it is a claim, not a page.

What you get

The page copy. Eight hundred to twelve hundred words per industry, written from the trade's vocabulary out, with headings, the objections section, the proof and one action, plus the title tag and meta description.

A vocabulary sheet. The terms that trade uses and the ones to avoid, with the everyday equivalents, so your quotes, emails and future pages use the same words the page does.

A pattern for the next one. The structure written down, with a note on which parts are fixed and which must be replaced entirely, so your own people can add a trade later without producing the substituted-name version.

A list of the trades you should not have a page for. Short, usually unwelcome, and often the most valuable part of the job.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. An IT support company in Alberta serves about sixty clients, of which roughly twenty are dental and medical clinics. Its website has one services page describing managed support for small business, and its enquiries are mostly price shoppers.

The clinic page is written from two afternoons spent with the owner and one practice manager. It uses the words the front desk uses: operatory, practice management software, imaging, recall. It states what has to happen to patient records when a workstation is replaced. The objections section answers the three that come up on every clinic call: what happens if the server fails during a clinic day, who is liable for a breach, and whether the work can be done outside operating hours. A short account of one clinic's move to new premises, approved by the practice manager, sits at the bottom. The company writes two industry pages and declines a third for legal firms, because it has one law client and nothing true to say.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which trades you actually serve, how many clients in each, and what those buyers ask that others do not. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. How many industries, the price and the dates, agreed before anything starts.
3. Immersion. Three to five working days per trade: a recorded conversation with whoever does the work, your call notes, the trade's own publications and the rules that apply.
4. The go or no-go. For each trade, I tell you whether there is enough that is true to justify a page. Any trade that fails comes off the quote.
5. The draft and one round of changes. Ideally read by a customer in that trade before it is published.
6. Final copy, vocabulary sheet and pattern. Delivered together.

Two weeks for the first industry page and about a week for each one after it, because the pattern is settled and only the immersion repeats.

What it costs

Industry pages are quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, and priced per industry when there is more than one. What moves the number is how regulated the trade is, how much of your experience is already written down, and whether a customer in the trade can be interviewed. The figure is fixed in writing before anything starts, and the pricing page shows the four ways of working.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The proof the page leans on gets written up properly as a customer story with the situation and the result. Where you serve particular places as well as particular trades, the same discipline applies to pages about a town. And when the aim is to be found by someone typing a trade and a service together, a page built for that one commercial search is a different job with different rules. None of that is assumed. An industry page is a complete piece of work on its own.