Your Business Does Several Things: Which One Leads?

You run a hair salon and you also do nails. And you sell a couple of products at the counter. And once a month you do makeup for a wedding. All of it is real, all of it pays, and none of it is a side project.

The trouble starts when you sit down to write the homepage. Everything you do wants to be first, and a page where everything is first is a page that says nothing.

What Goes First Isn't What You Do Most

The question people ask themselves, "what do I do most of?", is the wrong one. Nails might be half your register, but if you want to grow in color and treatments because the margin is better and it's the work you'd rather be doing, leading with nails pulls you further from that every month.

The homepage isn't an inventory. It's a direction.

Four Steps to Decide

1. Write down everything you do. Unfiltered. Including the thing you only do once a month.

2. Mark what a stranger would search for by name. If somebody recommends you to a friend, what do they say you do, in one sentence? That's the phrase people actually type.

3. Mark what leaves you the most margin. Not what sells most: what's left clean for every hour you work.

4. If those two match, that one leads. If they don't, the one that brings in new people wins.

When the Cheap Thing Leads and When the Expensive One Does

Leading with the most-searched service brings new people, because it matches what they're already looking for, and it's understood in three seconds without explaining anything. The risk is anchoring yourself forever to the cheapest thing you sell.

Leading with the higher-margin service attracts the customer who already knows what they want and pays better for it. The cost is that it's harder to explain why they should choose you when they don't know you yet. It works when your calendar is already full and you want to change the kind of customer you get.

So: if you're starting out or competing for new customers, lead with the most-searched thing and put the profitable one as a second step inside the same visit. If you already have a full book, lead with the work you want more of.

Put Into Words

This isn't an abstract idea, it's a specific sentence you have to write today. Something shaped like: "Color and treatments in South Austin. Also cuts, nails and bridal makeup."

The first half is the direction. The second half is everything else, still said, still findable, just one step down. Nobody is being hidden. You're saying what you expect.

The Mistake That Costs You

The generous-looking mistake is a list: "cuts, color, nails, makeup, treatments, products." It leaves nothing out and it says nothing. Someone searching for color sees a list and can't tell whether you're any good at it, because you look equally committed to six things.

Pick one to lead. The list can live further down, where it belongs.

What You Walk Away With

The sentence that opens your homepage, and the reason it's that one and not another. Everything else you do still told, but a step below the headline. And a clear idea of when that sentence will need to change: when the kind of customer you want changes.

Yodai builds the site from what you tell it, with a store, bookings or quote requests depending on what you do. See what the website for your business looks like.