Have you ever gone to a dinner party with a group of doctors, and felt less than enthused as they launched into doctor speak and medical jokes, leaving the rest of the table feeling excluded and just a little unworthy?  Many organisations do their equivalent of doctor speak on their websites and it has the same impact – it drives their site viewers mad.

We can’t help ourselves when it comes to talking about our own businesses.  Many of us will talk enthusiastically about them to anyone who will listen.  We are caught up in the mechanics of how they work, how they are performing, how they are structured and how they can be improved. As managers we spend much of our time examining them and thinking about their configuration and make up. And this is entirely healthy.

But when someone visits your website they have little interest in the structure of your business or the mechanics of how it works.  All they want to know is how it might be relevant to helping them and how they can engage with it to fulfil a task.  Because of this we need to expose the myth that what we care about is the same as what our customers care about.  They have very different priorities to us and they use very different language to us to talk about the same thing.

The importance of the issue is further increased when you consider the impatience of an average web user. Not only do you need to ensure that your information is quickly presented, you need to ensure that you use the most relevant terms possible when trying to attract the user to it.  The user on your webpage will scan read, flitting from heading to heading until they find the category or the heading they need, in order to fulfil their task.

Sometimes we need to swallow our intellectual pride in order to carry this out.

For instance, in the airline industry lower cost seats are referred to internally as “low fares”.  However all customers want to know about is “cheap flights”.

We previously advised a customer who manages discretionary portfolios of customer investments.  They dislike the term wealth management because “it’s not what we do”, but all of their customers use the phrase “wealth management” to describe their business.  Consequently we have placed that phrase on their website.

Talk in language which your customer understands, pepper your site with relevant phrases which they use, and your website will perform better for you.  It may be difficult to let go of your professional pride in terms of the technically correct phraseology for your products & services, but the additional revenues your site will attract for your business will more than compensate.