Your fee schedule is a PDF

Twenty of the hundred points in the rubric go to a group I called answerable, and it is the group that separates a technically clean site from a useful one. A page can arrive fast, parse perfectly, carry valid markup and still answer not one question a buyer would actually ask.

The pattern is always the same. The facts people most want are the facts sitting inside a document. A fee schedule as a PDF. A capabilities overview as a slide deck. A service description that is a photograph of a printed page with the text baked into the pixels. Everything else on the site is text. The three things a buyer would choose you on are not.

Why the document is weaker than the page

A PDF is a second decision. Something reading your site has to choose to fetch it, hand it to a different parser, and hope there is selectable text inside rather than a scan. Plenty of the time it simply does not bother, and when the file turns out to be an image of a page, there was nothing to get anyway.

Compare that to a sentence in HTML, which requires no decision from anyone. Google has been saying a version of this for years about JavaScript, in its own documentation, and the logic transfers exactly: content that requires an extra step is content some readers will never reach. The PDF is the same problem wearing a different hat.

The three facts that are always missing

Price, or the shape of it. Almost nobody in professional services will put a number on a page, which is a defensible business decision and a terrible information decision, because the question gets asked constantly and something has to answer it. If you will not, the answer gets assembled from whoever will.

Who you are actually for. Most sites describe the service and skip the client. A single sentence about who this suits and who it does not is worth more than a page of capability language, and it is the thing that makes a recommendation land on you rather than near you.

What happens next. The process, in order, with what is required from the client at each step. This is the easiest one to fix and the most consistently absent, and it is exactly what a buyer asks a model when they are close to calling somebody.

The awkward-number problem

There is a real objection here and it deserves a straight answer rather than a workaround. Some firms cannot publish numbers. Regulated ones especially, where the number comes with review requirements attached and a marketing rule behind it.

Fine. Publish the structure instead. What the fee is based on, what makes it move, what the range depends on, what is included and what is billed separately. I have yet to see a compliance policy that forbids describing how you charge, and a buyer at that stage is usually looking for shape rather than a figure. The firm that explains its model in plain text gets described accurately. The firm with a hidden number and a contact form gets described by inference, and inference is generous to nobody.

How to fix it in an afternoon

Take your three most-downloaded documents and ask what facts are inside them that a buyer would want. Put those facts on pages, in text, with the document still there for anyone who wants the formatted version. Nothing is lost. The document keeps its job and the facts stop depending on it.

Then check whether the pages agree with the documents, because this is where it usually goes wrong. The old PDF says one minimum, the new page says another, and now your site contradicts itself in a way a machine will happily surface. That is a truth audit problem, and it is more common than the missing content problem it creates.

Next in this series: the accessibility tree, which is how an agent perceives your page at all, and which most teams have been under-funding for a decade for entirely different reasons.

Common questions