Solution pages

What a solution page is

A solution page is a page organised around one problem a buyer has, not around one thing you sell. It opens by describing the situation the reader is in, agrees that it is a real problem, explains what is causing it, and then shows the route out — which will usually involve two or three of your services working together rather than one.

This is the third of four page types that sit next to each other and get muddled. A service page is one page per thing you sell. A product page is one page per product. A solution page cuts across those: it is written for a buyer who knows what is wrong but not what to ask for. A feature page is the opposite end of the same line, written for somebody who already knows the exact capability they want.

The test is simple. If the heading is the name of something on your price list, it is a service or product page. If the heading is a sentence a buyer would say out loud to a colleague, it is a solution page.

Who this is for

Businesses whose internal structure has leaked onto the website. The navigation reads “Consulting, Implementation, Managed Services, Support”, which is how you are organised and how you invoice, and means nothing to somebody whose supplier has just gone under or whose insurer has just sent a letter.

It also suits any business where the sale involves more than one service. If your proposals routinely bundle three things together, no single service page describes what the customer is actually buying, and the buyer has to assemble the answer themselves from three pages. Most do not bother.

You do not need solution pages if you sell one thing to one kind of buyer who already knows its name. In that case a good set of service pages does the whole job for less money. You also should not write them before you know which problems buyers actually name, in their words — if that list is guesswork, buyer question research comes first, and it is the cheaper piece of work.

What goes in it

Each page follows the same order, which is the order the conversation takes when somebody phones you in the middle of the problem.

• The situation, named. A heading and opening paragraph the reader recognises as their own week. No jargon, no product names, no clever wording.
• What it is costing. The consequence of leaving it alone, stated plainly and without scare tactics. Buyers move when the cost of the problem exceeds the discomfort of hiring someone.
• Why it happens. The two or three usual causes, so the reader can tell which one is theirs. This is the section that earns the trust.
• What the fix involves. The route out, in order, naming which of your services does which part and what the reader could reasonably do themselves.
• What it takes. Rough timescale, what you need from them, what it costs or how the price is set, and the first step.

The set is planned before anything is written. I list the problems buyers arrive with, drop the ones you cannot genuinely solve, merge the ones buyers see as one thing, and agree the list with you. Four to six pages is usually the right number; a business with twelve solution pages has written a second website by accident.

What you get

The problem map. One document listing each solution page, the words buyers use for that problem, which of your services it draws on, and which service pages it links to. Two to three pages.

The pages. Each solution page as a separate document of 700 to 1,000 words, with headings, body, button labels, title tag and meta description.

A linking plan. A short note on how each solution page hands off to the service pages underneath it, so the two layers support each other instead of competing for the same reader.

A walkthrough call. Forty-five minutes with whoever takes the enquiries, because they are the ones who hear the problems in the first place.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A managed IT firm in Moncton has four service pages titled Managed Services, Cloud, Security and Projects. Enquiries arrive by phone and almost none through the site. Listening to a fortnight of first calls, three sentences come up again and again: we failed a client security questionnaire, we are opening a second location, and our server is out of support next year.

Three solution pages get written, one per sentence. The security questionnaire page opens by describing the email from a customer with the spreadsheet attached and the deadline, explains why the questions are being asked at all, lists the three or four answers that usually fail, and sets out a fortnight of work that draws on the security and managed services lines together. It names what an internal IT person could do without help, which costs the firm nothing and makes the rest believable. Each of the three pages ends with the same single step: a call to work out which of the causes applies. The four original service pages stay where they are and now sit underneath the three solution pages as the detail.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, what buyers phone about, and where the current navigation is describing your departments instead of their problems. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The number of pages, the price and the dates, agreed before anything starts.
3. Listening. Call notes, the enquiry inbox, lost-deal emails and a conversation with whoever answers the phone. Five working days, and it is where the headings come from.
4. The problem map. You confirm the list of pages before a word of any page is written.
5. Drafts and delivery. Pages in batches of two, one round of changes each, then the full set with the linking plan and the walkthrough call.

Three to five weeks for a set of four to six pages is typical.

What it costs

Solution pages are quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. The size varies more than most page work, because the research that finds the real problems is the part that makes the pages worth having, and some businesses already have that material in their sales notes while others do not. The price is fixed in writing before the work starts and does not move unless you change the scope. The pricing page sets out the four ways of working and how a quote is built.

What happens next

Solution pages usually expose gaps underneath them. The commonest next steps are tightening the pages for each thing you sell that the solution pages now point at, adding a worked account of one customer for the problem that closes the most business, and saying the same thing in one trade’s vocabulary where a single sector accounts for much of your work. Each of those is a separate decision, taken once the solution pages are live. This piece of work is complete on its own.