Dallas’s Best Web Habit Is One Line of Text

Last Tuesday night I read a stranger’s homepage out loud to my wife at the kitchen table.

The site belonged to a Dallas business, one of a batch I’d had open on my phone since lunchtime.

She sells insurance, she had a coffee in front of her, and she has never had the slightest interest in anything I do for a living.

I read her the biggest line at the top of the page, word for word, and then asked her what the company sold.

She couldn’t tell me. Her guess was a gym. It was a family law practice in Plano.

She went back to her coffee, and I sat there holding the phone for longer than I want to admit.

The one thing this city does better than most

Out of every check I run on a small business website, the one Dallas places highest on is that line at the top of the page.

75.1% of the Dallas sites I opened carry an H1, against 73.7% across the country.

H1 is what the code calls that line, and your customer meets it twice without ever hearing the word.

She reads it in the blue line Google prints when it hands her your name in a list of ten others, and she reads it again at the top of the page two seconds after she taps.

Google’s own documentation lists heading elements among the things it uses to build that blue link, and it tells you outright to put your title text into the first visible H1 on the page.

So one sentence does two jobs at once, telling a person what they’re looking at and telling Google what to call you in front of someone who has never heard your name.

Skip it and both of them are left guessing, and they will guess from your menu, your footer, or whatever else happens to sit near the top of the page.

Have you ever seen the guess? Most owners never have, because they reach their own homepage by typing the address in rather than by looking themselves up the way a stranger has to.

The headline I shipped and had to live with

Dallas is better at this than most of the country, sixth of 24 on the morning I put the cities in order by that one check, and I still handed a paying client a homepage headline that said nothing at all.

That shape holds everywhere else too. The city finished fifth overall without coming first at anything, which is a decent report card and a hard one to brag about.

This was Richardson, years ago, a second generation family business repairing commercial refrigeration.

The photography was gorgeous and I was proud of the whole thing. Across the top, in enormous letters, it said “Quality You Can Trust Since 1994”.

He’d been buying advertising that pointed at that page for two months before he rang me.

The calls were coming in, he said, and every one of them was the wrong sort of call. People asking whether he sold used appliances. People asking if he’d look at a fridge in a kitchen.

He wasn’t angry with me, which was worse. He said he’d assumed that was how websites were supposed to sound.

We changed one line. “Walk-in cooler and freezer repair across North Dallas, same day.” Nothing else on the page moved.

The wrong calls dried up inside a month and the right ones started arriving.

The heading sits near the top of everything I check before a site goes live now, above the speed work and the photography. Nothing I build goes live until someone outside the trade can read the top line and tell me what the business sells and where. My wife has been that someone more times than she’d like.

Would a stranger manage it with yours, in four seconds, knowing nothing about your company?

And what has the line at the top of your homepage been costing you every month while it sits there sounding like everybody else?

Why no other check on my list works like this

Most of the things I test for are chores, because you add the code once, tick the box, and never think about any of it again for the rest of your life.

The heading refuses to behave that way, because nothing on earth can write the sentence for you.

Any decent theme wraps your headline in the right code without being asked. No theme in the history of the internet has decided what that headline ought to say.

So a technical check turns out to have a writing job hiding inside it.

Which also means money was never the obstacle. Assisted living homes write the strongest title tags of any trade I check, and not one of the habits behind that costs a dollar.

And writing is where I watch small business websites fall apart, week after week, long after the design has been signed off and paid for.

How a site ends up with no headline at all

Nobody sits down and deletes their heading on purpose. It goes missing by accident, and after years of opening other people’s websites I keep meeting the same three accidents.

The designer styled a plain box of text to look big and bold instead of marking it as a heading. It looks perfect to you and reads as an ordinary paragraph to everything else.

Or the top of the page is one enormous photo with the words baked into the image, which looks gorgeous on a laptop and says nothing whatsoever to a search engine or to a customer using a screen reader.

Or a page builder started the layout on a smaller heading because it looked better at that size, and the real one never got added back in.

All three of those accidents are invisible from where you’re sitting, your site looks perfectly fine to you, and you’d have no reason whatsoever to suspect a thing.

Want to know for certain? Right-click your homepage, choose to view the page source, and search that wall of code for “h1”, which takes twenty seconds and beats assuming.

The three headlines I keep finding

Three of them turn up more often than everything else put together, and I’d guess you’ve written one of them yourself.

“Welcome to Our Website.” Very kind of you. Who are you, though, and what is it you do?

Then the business name, set enormous, in a font nobody can read on a phone at a bus stop. Your name isn’t a headline. It’s a name.

And my favorite, a lovely photograph of a truck or a smiling family with no words on the screen at all, which is beautiful and tells a stranger nothing about whether you can solve her problem this afternoon.

Recognize any of those? I’ve built two of them myself, and both times I told myself the design was doing the talking.

A headline worth keeping does three things inside about eight words: it names the work, it names the place, and it uses the language your customer would use instead of the shorthand you use with your own staff. A landscaper once drove across town to ask me what he should fix, and his whole problem was the words themselves, because nobody has ever typed “commercial grounds maintenance solutions” into a phone.

“Emergency AC repair in North Dallas, same day” isn’t clever, and it will never leave a visitor unsure about whether she’s arrived in the right place.

Clever is for slogans. Your headline is the sign on the door, and signs are supposed to be boring.

So which have you got up there at the moment, a sign or a slogan?

Before you frame this result

One thing stops me calling any of it a victory for Dallas.

My check is dumb on purpose, because it looks for the tag rather than for a good sentence. A page whose main heading reads “Home” passes exactly the same test as one naming the job, the neighborhood and the fact that you answer the phone on a Sunday.

So 75.1% is the friendliest possible count of Dallas headlines. The number of sites where the sentence is any good sits below that, and I can’t tell you by how much.

I sat and read a pile of them the week I worked through the Dallas homepages. “Home” came up. “Our Services” came up. So did a company name I had already read in the browser tab a second earlier.

Every one of those counted as a pass when I added Dallas up, and not one of them would have got my wife any closer to a right answer.

Which is why I won’t hand this city a trophy for it. A tick in a box is not a sentence that sells anything.

Now go and read yours out loud

Wait until you’re near someone who doesn’t know your trade. Open your homepage on your phone, hand it over, and don’t scroll.

Read them the first big line, word for word, the way I read that law firm to my wife. Then ask them what this business sells and where it does it.

If they can’t answer both questions from that one line, your most valuable piece of copy is a riddle, and no amount of speed work or expensive new photography is going to rescue it.

If rewriting the thing isn’t a job you want, I do it for businesses around Dallas most weeks, usually in the first hour of a project, because it moves more than it has any right to move.

Or send me the address and I’ll tell you what your headline says and what I’d put there instead. Costs nothing, and I’ll be straight with you even when straight stings a little.

Read it out loud first, though. Out loud is where the wincing happens.