The Phrase Swap Shop: What You Write vs What Your Customer Actually Hears
Every small business website has one page that reads like it was written by a committee who didn't much like each other. You know the one. It mentions 'solutions' four times, never once says what the thing costs, and finishes with a promise to 'leverage our expertise going forward'. The person who wrote it wasn't being dishonest. They were being careful — and careful is where clarity goes to die.
Here's the case for treating jargon as a financial problem rather than a taste problem.
Jargon is a conversion tax, not a personality flaw
Nobody loses a sale because of one bad sentence. That's exactly why the problem survives. Jargon doesn't rob you in one dramatic heist; it takes a tenner out of the till every hour, forever.
Picture a customer who's comparing three suppliers on a Tuesday night, phone in one hand, tea in the other. Two of the websites are clear. Yours says 'bespoke end-to-end solutionising'. They don't reject you — they just quietly stop reading. No complaint, no data, no bounce rate that tells you why. Just a slightly cooler lead.
Multiply that by every page, every quote, every email footer. That's the tax: small, invisible, compounding.
The translation desk
Run your worst offenders through this. Written for you, heard by them, say this instead.
'We're solutionising' — heard as: we haven't decided yet. Try: We're working out the next step. You'll have a plan from us by Friday.
'Leveraging synergies' — heard as: two teams merged and somebody's job is wobbling. Try: You now get one contact instead of three.
'Bespoke end-to-end offering' — heard as: expensive, and I can't tell what it is. Try: We handle everything from the survey to the final clean-up. It costs £X.
'Best-in-class' — heard as: nobody checked. Try: It's the fastest one we've tested, by about two hours.
'We're passionate about...' — heard as: we have no evidence. Try: We've done this 400 times.
'Circle back' — heard as: I will forget. Try: I'll email you Thursday.
'Scalable' — heard as: we hope you grow a lot. Try: It won't fall over if you double your orders.
'Low-hanging fruit' — heard as: I haven't thought about this properly. Try: The quickest win is X.
'Reach out' — heard as: I'm about to sell you something. Try: Give me a ring — or just ring them.
'Going forward' — heard as: things are bad now. Try: deleting it. The sentence works without it. It always works without it.
'Holistic approach' — heard as: we haven't scoped this. Try: It covers A, B and C.
'Solutions' as a noun for your actual product — heard as: nothing at all. Try: the word for the thing. Software. Bookkeeping. Van hire. Bread.
The two tests worth remembering
The van test. Could you say the sentence out loud to a customer in a van, a shop doorway, or a slightly damp car park, without feeling like a wally? If not, it's not ready for the website.
The decision test. Does this phrase help the customer decide something? 'VAT-registered', 'sole trader', 'FCA-regulated', 'CIS' — these are jargon, technically, but they're load-bearing. They tell someone whether they can work with you. Keep those. Bin the ones that only signal which tribe you belong to.
The half-hour jargon amnesty
This works better as a group activity than a solo one, mainly because everyone is blind to their own phrases and delighted to spot everyone else's.
- Book thirty minutes. Everyone brings their three most-wince-inducing phrases from your own site, quotes or emails.
- Write them on a whiteboard or a shared doc. No defending your own — you're the one who wrote it, we know, it's fine.
- Vote for the five worst. That's your banned list for the quarter.
- Each person rewrites one page or template. Not the whole site. One page.
- Ship it, then repeat in three months. New jargon grows back like bindweed.
The bit people get wrong
Plain English isn't dumbing down. Nobody has ever left a website thinking 'that was too easy to understand, I'll go elsewhere'. If your buyer is a procurement officer or a finance director, they're not impressed by 'synergy' — they're tired, they've got six of these to read before home time, and you've just made their evening longer.
The trade-off is real, though: clarity feels exposed. 'We do the whole job, it costs £4,000, it takes three weeks' can be argued with. 'Bespoke end-to-end solutions' cannot. That's precisely why people reach for it.
Being clear is a small act of courage, repeated. Twelve phrases swapped is maybe twelve per cent of a better website. Do it anyway. Your customers are reading in their dressing gowns and they'd quite like to know what you sell.
