B2B websites look better than they did five years ago. Cleaner design, faster load. What hasn’t improved is whether the person the site was built for recognizes themselves in it.

A visitor lands on your home page and one of two things happens. They skim it like a brochure in the proverbial waiting room and leave. Or they stop and think, “this firm gets the exact situation I’m in.” The second reaction is the goal, and it’s not really about how pretty the site is.

Getting to that goal takes marketing strategy, not a redesign − yet. You have to know exactly who your buyer is, not “anybody and everybody”, and you have to explicitly name their problem. And those words are meant to be their words, not the language your entire profession typically uses when marketing itself.

You may find that when you start rewriting the site around the buyer, other important things may surface. Maybe your service offering isn’t aligned with what the market wants now. Or your firm sounds exactly like three of your key competitors with the same words, list of services and credentials. It’s easier for the reader to walk away.

The Buyer Has To See Their Own Problem On The Page Before They’ll Believe You Can Solve It.

A site that talks about itself makes the visitor do the translating, and busy buyers don’t translate. They leave. Do that work for them and you’ve likely earned a discovery call.

Who you’re talking to determines what you say

A website can’t speak to everyone and land with anyone. Firms wear “we serve everybody” like a badge. To the buyer it reads as generic, and generic is invisible. Anybody plus everybody equals no one.

I started working with a client last year, a highly respected consulting firm in its industry, and the CEO was a member of a variety of networking groups for over twelve years, and well known for their expertise. Their business targets technology firms. She told me that in our first ten minutes. Ironically, this was nowhere to be found on their website, in the company’s bios in membership directories and on LinkedIn. It was clearly missing when she introduced herself in a room full of the exact people she wanted to connect with but they had no way to recognize the connections because she never named them.

The same blind spot shows up at the other end of the market, in a different scenario. A CEO I spoke with runs a fast-growing industrial company: new regions, a new service line, on track to double revenue. His instinct was to put all of it on the site, the expansion and the company’s long history. But a buyer in a region that has never heard of this firm doesn’t care about the growth story. He cares whether this firm understands the problem he’s trying to solve right now. A website that features how far the company has come is still a site about the company.

What to look for. Open your home page and give yourself five seconds, the way a first time visitor would. Can they tell who you serve? If all they get is a service list and a line or two about quality, they have no reason to believe you understand them, and they’re gone. Naming your buyer feels like shrinking the business. It does the opposite. It’s what lets the right client find you.

Differentiation the buyer can actually feel

Ask the CEO what makes their company different and you’ll hear about deep experience and responsive, caring client service. All true, and all claimed word for word by every competitor. Being well described isn’t being different, and no buyer ever decided on an adjective everyone uses!

Real differentiation lives inside the buyer’s decision. Does the site name what they’re actually weighing? Does it speak to the fear under the purchase, the thing they won’t say out loud on a first call? Buyers connect on the problem and the stakes, not the feature list. That’s where the emotion is, and people decide and act on emotion.

What to do differently. Take any line of website copy a competitor could copy onto their own site and cut it. It was never differentiation. Build your positioning from your buyer’s real decision criteria instead, and it holds. It also lays the foundation to position the firm for value-based pricing for work that’s described clearly and doesn’t sound like anyone else.

Where everyone in your category sounds the same

I do a deep dive for my clients’ competitive analysis to achieve clarity on positioning and understand the “experience” and the takeaways visitors have when they land on their sites, as well as my clients’. You can do a quick check on your own site. Pick three competitors and read their websites next to yours. Leadership teams are usually startled when they see their own site from this perspective. The messages are nearly identical, sometimes the words are exactly the same, and they are all internally focused. 

The finding that matters isn’t that a competitor says it better. It’s that nobody in the category is making the buyer’s decision easier. Every site is turned inward, talking about itself. Far from a threat, that’s the opening. Turn the page around, speak to the decision the buyer is trying to make in their own words, and you’ll stand out by contrast.

What you’ll find. One client, after we read her site against her competitors, saw that her own words were interchangeable with everyone else’s, and that not one provider was giving the buyer what they needed to choose. That gap is where you become the obvious choice, by being the only one in the conversation actually speaking with the buyer.

The outsider’s perspective, and why you can’t do this alone

You can’t read your own website the way a buyer does. You know too much – you can’t unsee it. You fill in context the visitor doesn’t have and read your own intentions into words a stranger reads flat. The knowledge that makes you good at the work is what blinds you to how it’s described.

If you owned an accounting firm, you wouldn’t have your own firm audit its own books (putting aside the fact that’s not legal!). You’re too close, and being close is the problem. A good accountant is worth paying because they sit outside the numbers. Marketing is no different. 

What to ask yourself. Look at your site’s navigation, can a visitor tell in five seconds who you serve? On the home page, does the first screen explicitly name the buyer’s problem or your firm’s history? On a service page, does it speak to what the client is deciding, or just list what you do? Then the “Translation Test”: take any sentence about your firm and ask whether your ideal client would say it that way, or whether it’s your terminology. 

Before the next redesign

Your website project was never really a design question. Underneath it is a harder one: who is this for, and would they know it the second they land on your home page? Strategy answers that. Translating strategy into the buyer’s language is where a firm becomes recognizable instead of interchangeable.

Before you approve another round of design, read your home page’s first screen, “above the fold” as your ideal client would. Do they see themselves, or do they see only you? Could a competitor drop their logo onto your words and have every word be true? If so it’s time to get to work.

Download The Outside-In Website Audit Now!