Her Entertainment Site Needed One Line, Not Twelve Blog Posts

An email arrived on a Tuesday morning from a woman who runs two escape rooms. Entertainment owners send me this one more than any other.

“We’re on the second page of Google for the exact thing we sell, and my designer says we need more content. Is he right?”

He wasn’t right, and I was fairly sure of that before I’d opened her website, which is a terrible habit for an auditor to admit to having.

I wrote back with one question instead of an answer. What does the biggest line of text at the top of your homepage say?

“BOOK NOW. That’s the button.”

Fine. What sits above the button?

“The logo, and the photograph of the vault door.”

And underneath it?

“Three tiles. Ravenwood, The Vault, Lost Signal. Those are the rooms.”

Beautiful names, all three of them. I’d book Lost Signal on the strength of the name alone and I’ve never even met the woman.

Her homepage did not contain the words escape room anywhere a stranger would meet them first, and it never mentioned the name of her town at all.

“Everyone round here knows what Ravenwood is.”

Everyone round there who has already been, yes. She had two locations, six part time staff and a lease to cover, and her whole problem was the people who hadn’t.

The names that only work inside the building

Ravenwood is a wonderful word once you have spent an hour locked inside it with your brother in law. Before that, it is a word.

Every entertainment business I audit keeps a private vocabulary like that one, and I love them for it. Room names, show names, the Thursday night the regulars call by a nickname that predates the current owner.

All of it works beautifully at the door and does absolutely nothing for a stranger who is three seconds into deciding whether you exist.

So the top of your homepage is the one place on the internet where you have to talk like an outsider, which is a miserable thing to ask of people whose entire charm is the inside joke.

The check this whole industry loses

The morning I finished counting, I put all 47 industries in order on the heading check, and entertainment came up 40 of 47.

67.3% of the entertainment websites I audited carry a heading on the homepage, against 73.7% across everything I check.

Her page had large text on it. It did not have a heading.

H1 means top level heading, the single line a page marks as its most important, and text that merely looks big on the screen is a different thing altogether.

So why does an entire industry lose the same check? Because of how these homepages open, and yours almost certainly opens the same way.

I built one of them myself, a comedy club homepage carrying the club’s name and not one word more, and the owner rang me seven months later to ask why only the touring names were selling.

A full width photograph, or the poster for the next show, or a video of last summer’s crowd playing silently behind a booking button.

The words are inside the artwork, which makes them a picture of words. Your eye reads them beautifully, and nothing else on earth does, including a search engine and including the phone of a customer who has her screen reading the page aloud to her.

Her second answer, which was a good one

“It’s in the title tag though. He showed me the title tag.”

It was, and it was written properly. Title tag means the page’s stored name, the wording your browser drops into the tab and a search engine borrows when it lists you.

99.0% of this industry has one written, which is about what I get everywhere, at 99.1% nationally.

Nearly nobody fails that check, so passing it tells you almost nothing about your website.

The heading is the same words doing a second job, in public, where a human being reads them. Her page had the private half filled in and the public half left blank.

Then we got to the twelve blog posts

“So do we write the blog posts? He wants twelve of them.”

I asked what the twelve would be about. Team building tips, she said, and she said it in the voice of a woman who already knew the answer.

28.3% of this industry publishes a blog where 37% manage it nationally, and I have never once traced a booking back to twelve articles written in a hurry by someone who didn’t want to write them. A mover with six trucks wrote forty and wanted the lot deleted, though he was aiming at the wrong thing.

Would you read a team building article from an escape room? Would you read one from any business you’d first heard of four minutes earlier?

Twelve of them, written to a quota by someone who resents the job, will land on every habit that makes a business blog worthless inside a fortnight.

More content is what people recommend when nobody wants to say the awkward thing, which is that the page you already have doesn’t introduce the business.

“So what do I actually change?”

One line.

What twenty minutes on the phone did

We put a sentence where BOOK NOW had been. It named the kind of business, the town, and who the rooms were built for, and the whole conversation took about twenty minutes.

The button moved down an inch and got bigger, which her designer hated. I understand him completely, because I’ve been the annoyed designer on someone else’s advice more than once.

Six weeks later she emailed to say the phone was ringing differently, and she asked whether she still needed the blog. She does not. She hasn’t written it.

None of this makes her website a bad website.

Overall the industry sits at 71 out of 100 once every check is added up, a respectable middle of the pack, and most of the pages I opened were built by people who obviously cared about them.

The heading is the one job nothing automatic will ever do for you. Any decent theme hands you the code for it and then waits, patiently and forever, for a human being to type the actual sentence.

When I take on an entertainment website, that sentence gets written before anything else and it’s the last thing I let anybody talk me out of.

Go and look at yours

Open your homepage on your phone and read the biggest words at the top of it.

If they say Book Now, or Welcome, or Est. 2009, or nothing but the name of the business, rewrite them until a stranger can tell what you sell and what town you sell it in.

That sentence is worth more to you than every other change you could make to that page this year, and I say that as a man who charges people to make the other changes.

If you’d rather I read yours back to you before you touch it, send me the address and I’ll tell you what it currently says, and what I’d put there instead, and how long that would take.

Then fix the top line and ignore everything else in this post. The tags, the tiles, the blog, the photograph you paid a fortune for. One line.