The copy is the part of a website project that stalls. The design is agreed, the build is waiting, and everyone is waiting on someone to write the words. Eventually the owner sits down at eleven at night, writes something that sounds like every other company in the trade, and the site launches with it.
That version is worse than what they would have said out loud to a customer standing in front of them. Which is the whole point: you already know how to explain your business. The problem is that people switch into a different, worse voice the moment they are writing for a website.
Start from what you already say
Before writing anything, write down the last ten questions a customer asked you on the phone. Actual questions, in their words.
Do you cover Marianna. How much is something like this. How soon could you start. Do you do the electrical as well or do I need someone else. What happens if it rains. Is that price with the parts.
That list is your website. Most business sites answer none of those and instead explain that the company was founded on a commitment to excellence.
Then write down how you answered. Not how you would write it. How you said it. That is your voice, and it is already better than the one people reach for when they open a blank document.
The rules that do most of the work
Lead with the thing they came for. People arrive with a question. Answer it in the first two lines, then explain. A homepage whose first screen says what you do and where you do it outperforms one that opens with a mission statement, every time.
Be specific, because specifics are the only thing that cannot be copied. “Fast, reliable service” is a sentence your competitor can paste onto their site unaltered. “We answer the phone ourselves, and if we say Tuesday morning we are there Tuesday morning” cannot be, because it is a claim someone could check.
Specifics are also what people remember. Nobody remembers that you are dedicated to quality. They remember that you clean up before you leave.
Name the town. Not for search engines, for people. Somebody in Dothan reading a page that mentions Dothan believes you work there. Somebody reading about “the Southeast region” does not.
Say something about price. Not necessarily a number. A shape: most projects like this start around a certain figure, or a typical job runs a few hundred dollars, or it depends on these three things. The most common reason someone leaves a small business site is that they cannot tell whether they can afford you, and silence reads as expensive.
Write to one person. “You” and “we”, not “our clients” and “the company”. You are not addressing a market. You are addressing whoever is holding the phone.
The words to take out
Every industry has a set of phrases that mean nothing and appear everywhere. If you can delete a sentence and lose no information, it was one of them.
Passionate about. Solutions. Cutting edge. World class. Committed to excellence. We go the extra mile. Full service. Turnkey. Industry leading. Your trusted partner. Second to none. State of the art. Unparalleled. Bespoke, when you mean it is made to fit.
The test: could your closest competitor put this sentence on their site without changing a word? If yes, it is doing nothing for you but taking up the space where a real fact could go.
The other test, harder and more useful: would you say this out loud to a customer? Nobody has ever stood in a driveway and said they are passionate about delivering turnkey solutions.
How to build a service page
The same shape works for nearly everything.
What it is, in one sentence. Plainly. “We build websites for small businesses in Florida, Alabama, Ohio and Indiana.”
Who it is for, and who it is not for. Naming who you are not for is the most persuasive thing on most pages, because it proves you are not saying yes to everyone. It also saves you the inquiries that were never going to work out.
What actually happens. The steps, in order, with rough timings. People are not buying the outcome, they are buying the experience of the process, and they are nervous about it because they have been let down before.
What it costs, or how cost works. See above.
What you need from them. Photographs, access, a decision by a certain date. Setting this out early makes you look like someone who has done this before.
The obvious objections, answered. Whatever people hesitate about. Write the honest answer, including the part that is not entirely in your favor. Admitting a limitation is the fastest way to be believed about everything else.
One clear next step. One. A page offering a call, a form, an email, a download, and a newsletter is a page that gets none of them.
Getting it out of your head
If writing is the part you dread, do not write. Talk.
Record yourself answering the ten questions as though a customer asked them. Get it transcribed. What comes back will be too long and full of repetition, and it will contain three or four sentences that are better than anything you would have typed. Keep those, cut the rest, and stitch it together.
This works because the difficulty was never that you do not know what to say. It is that writing makes people formal, and formal is the enemy of persuasive.
Two checks before it goes live
Read it aloud. Every sentence you stumble over is one a reader will stumble over. Anything you would be embarrassed to say to a person’s face comes out.
Apply the “so what” test to each claim. We use quality materials. So what? So the finish does not fade in two summers, and here is a photograph of a job from 2021. The second version is the one worth having, and it is one question away from the first.
The thing to keep in mind
The best small business copy does not read as marketing. It reads like a competent person explaining what they do and what it will cost, in the same voice they would use in a kitchen.
That voice is the one asset a larger competitor with a bigger budget genuinely cannot buy off you.
