A service menu page

Describe the situation, not the service

Neither your customers nor an answer engine knows your service names. They know what is wrong or what they want. An entry that opens by naming the situation lets somebody recognize themselves in it immediately.

So lead each item with the problem. If your gutters overflow in heavy rain is a better opening than gutter maintenance package, and it costs nothing to write it that way round.

This is the same principle as our page on search intent. People arrive with a situation, and the page that matches the situation wins.

Keep your internal names out of it entirely. Package names, tier names and anything with a number in it mean something to you and nothing at all to a customer choosing under time pressure.

Give each entry enough to choose on

Who it is for, what it includes, roughly how long it takes, and roughly what it costs. Four lines per service is usually enough to let somebody decide or rule it out.

Ruling out matters as much as choosing. A menu that lets the wrong customer leave quickly saves both sides a conversation, and it improves the enquiries you do receive.

Say what happens after they choose. A menu entry ending with a clear next step converts far better than one ending with a name and nothing else.

Say what is not included too. The exclusions are what customers remember arguing about, and putting them on the menu removes the conversation before it ever becomes a disagreement.

Pricing on a menu

Publish something even if it is not a fixed figure. From figures, ranges, or what determines the cost all answer the real question, which is whether this is in their world at all.

A menu with no prices produces enquiries from people who cannot afford it and loses people who could. Both are expensive, and the second is invisible to you.

Our page on pricing claims covers presenting figures safely, including the wording that creates obligations you did not intend.

What makes a menu usable

The list below is what makes a menu usable. Most service pages carry a list of names and a paragraph, which asks the customer to do work they will not do.

• Each entry opening with the situation it solves
• Who it is for and who it is not for
• What is included, in plain terms
• Roughly what it costs, or what determines that
• Roughly how long it takes
• A link to the full page where one exists
• One clear next step per entry

When a service needs its own page

When it needs more than a paragraph, when people search for it by name, or when it is commercially important enough to deserve proper treatment with photographs and questions answered.

Then the menu entry becomes a summary and a link. That arrangement is stronger than either extreme, because the menu stays scannable and the service gets the depth it needs.

Our page on site structure covers the hub and page relationship, and a service menu is the clearest example of it on a business site.

Ordering the list

Put the service you most want more of first, not the one you find most interesting and not alphabetically. The order is a commercial decision and most menus make it by accident.

Group where there are more than about six. Ungrouped lists past that length stop being read, and people choose the first thing that looks close rather than the right thing.

Keep the grouping in the customer's terms too. By property type or by problem beats by internal department every time.

Keeping it honest

Remove services you no longer offer rather than leaving them listed. Enquiries for work you stopped doing two years ago waste time and read as carelessness when you explain.

Check the prices and inclusions on a schedule. A menu is the page where stale figures do the most damage, because a customer has already decided by the time they reach you.

Our page on keeping content current covers the routine, and a service menu should be near the top of any review list.

Say when the menu was last reviewed. A visible date tells a reader the figures are current, which is the question they are quietly asking of every price on the page.