I audited 14 B2B websites in Bergen County last quarter. Twelve of them used the word “solutions” in their hero headline. Nine used “innovative.” Seven used “excellence.” Read those headlines back to back and they blur into a single beige sentence: “We deliver innovative solutions with excellence.” That headline could belong to an HVAC company, a law firm, a SaaS platform, or a sandwich shop. When your homepage is interchangeable with 2,000 other homepages, it’s invisible — and invisible doesn’t book calls.
Why these three words went bad
“Solutions,” “innovative,” and “excellence” weren’t always empty. Twenty years ago they signaled something. Then every consultancy, agency, and B2B vendor on Earth used them as filler. Now the brain treats them as wallpaper — visible but unread. The eye literally skips them in heatmap studies. The visitor’s question on landing is “what do you actually do, and is it for me?” These three words answer neither.
Worse, they signal something specific now: that the company couldn’t be bothered to write a real sentence. Generic copy is read as low effort. Low effort is read as low quality. The visitor leaves before scrolling.
Real before/after from an audit last month
Client: a Bergen County commercial cleaning company doing $2.4M/year. Their old hero headline:
“Innovative cleaning solutions delivered with excellence to the tri-state area.”
The rewrite we shipped:
“We clean 40,000 sq ft medical and office buildings in Bergen County after 6 PM — no day-shift disruption, COI on file, single dispatcher.”
Same business. Same service. Time on page jumped from 18 seconds to 1:14. Contact form submissions went from 3/month to 11/month inside 60 days. Nothing else changed — same traffic source, same ad spend, same page design.
The substitution rule
Every time you’re tempted to write “solutions,” “innovative,” or “excellence,” replace it with one of these:
- A number — square feet, headcount, dollars, minutes, years, miles.
- A noun for the actual thing — “cleaning service” not “cleaning solutions,” “software” not “innovative platform.”
- A geography — “Bergen County,” “tri-state,” “Route 17 corridor,” “Manhattan within 45 min.”
- A constraint you respect — “no day-shift disruption,” “no 3-month onboarding,” “no minimum contract.”
- A vertical — “medical buildings,” “law firms,” “manufacturers under 200 employees.”
Any of those carries more information than all three banned words combined.
The “could this be a sandwich shop?” test
Read your homepage hero out loud. If a sandwich shop could legitimately use the same headline by swapping one noun, the headline is dead. “Innovative solutions delivered with excellence” works for sandwiches. “Same-day commercial HVAC repair in northern New Jersey, 24/7 dispatch, no overtime fees” does not. The second one tells the sandwich shop to back off.
Why the rewrites are scary at first
Specific copy excludes people. That’s the whole point — and that’s also what makes most owners flinch. When the headline says “40,000 sq ft medical and office buildings,” a homeowner looking for house cleaning bounces immediately. Good. They were never going to convert and they cost you bandwidth and form-spam. The 30 visitors who DO match the description now self-identify in 3 seconds and read the rest of the page like it was written for them. Because it was.
The instinct to keep copy broad (“we don’t want to scare anyone off”) is the exact instinct that kills B2B conversion. You’re not running a Walmart. You’re running a service business with limited capacity. Filter harder, convert better.
How AJD handles this
Hero rewrites are the cheapest, fastest CRO win on a B2B site. I run a 45-minute interview, draft 3 versions, ship the winner to a staging environment, and we measure for 30 days. Fixed scope: $1,200 for the headline + sub-headline + first CTA block. If your traffic isn’t high enough to be worth the rewrite, I’ll tell you — whether you work with us or not.
Want me to read your hero out loud and tell you if it passes the sandwich-shop test? 15 minutes, no charge. Book Free Discovery Call →
