Read the homepages of five businesses in the same trade and you’ll often find the same sentences. “We pride ourselves on quality.” “Customer satisfaction is our priority.” “A professional, reliable service.” None of it is untrue. It’s just that none of it tells a visitor anything they couldn’t have guessed. Better website copy says something specific.
That’s brochure copy. It’s written to sound impressive rather than to be understood, and people skim straight past it. The fix isn’t to hire a poet. It’s to write the way you’d explain your business to a sensible customer across a table.
If you’re writing the website copy for your own site, or rewriting some tired pages this summer, here’s how to do it.
Start with the reader, and be clear
Write for one reader with one question
Before writing a page, picture a single real customer and the question that brought them to it. “Can you fix a flat roof on a terraced house, and how soon?” “Do you do payroll for a business with twelve staff?” Then answer that question as directly as you can.
Writing for “our clients” in general produces vague website copy. Writing for one person with one question produces clear copy, and it tends to work for everyone else too.
Clarity beats cleverness
Visitors scan. They read the first few words of a heading, glance at a sentence or two, and decide whether to carry on. Help them.
- Use short sentences. One idea per sentence. If you need a breath halfway through, split it.
- Use everyday words. “Use” not “utilise”. “Help” not “facilitate”. “Start” not “commence”.
- Cut the jargon. Trade terms you use every day can baffle customers. If you must use one, explain it.
- Say the important thing first. Don’t build up to it. Put the answer at the top and the detail underneath.
- Write “you” and “we”. “We’ll call you back within an hour” reads better than “Customers can expect a prompt response”.
Puns and wordplay have their place, but not at the cost of someone understanding what you do. If a headline needs explaining, it isn’t working.
Benefits, features and why you need both
A feature is what something is or does. A benefit is what that means for the customer. “Same-day call-outs” is a feature. “Your heating back on tonight, not next week” is the benefit.
Most website copy lists features, because that’s how the business thinks about its services. Customers think in benefits: time saved, worry removed, money made, hassle avoided. So lead with the benefit, then back it up with the feature that makes it true.
Don’t swing too far the other way, though. Benefits with no features behind them sound like empty promises. The strongest sentences have both: what you get, and how.
Specifics over adjectives
Adjectives are cheap. Anyone can call themselves reliable, friendly or experienced. Specifics are harder to fake, which is exactly why readers trust them.
Instead of “experienced team”, say how long you’ve been trading or what your team has done. Instead of “fast turnaround”, say how fast. Instead of “competitive prices”, give a starting price or explain what affects the cost. Instead of “we cover the North West”, name the towns.
A useful test: go through a page and highlight every adjective. For each one, ask whether you could replace it with a fact. Usually you can, and the sentence gets better.
If a sentence could appear unchanged on a competitor’s website, it isn’t doing any work on yours.
Headings and buttons that say something
Headings
Many visitors only read the headings, so make them carry meaning. “Our approach” and “Why choose us” say nothing on their own. “Fixed quotes, no surprises” or “Most jobs finished in one visit” tell the skimmer something worth knowing. Read your headings in a list, without the text beneath. They should still make sense and tell the story of the page.
Calls to action
The wording on buttons and links matters more than its size suggests. “Submit”, “Click here” and “Learn more” are vague. Say what happens next: “Get a quote”, “Book a free survey”, “See our prices”. If there’s a reassurance people need, put it right next to the button, such as “No obligation” or “We reply within one working day”.
Keep to one main action per page where you can. Offering five equally loud options usually means people choose none.
Edit your website copy, then read it out loud
First drafts are always longer and stiffer than they need to be. Once you’ve written a page, cut it by a third. Remove throat-clearing openings like “At our company, we believe”, repeated points, and anything a customer wouldn’t miss.
Then read it out loud. You’ll hear the clunky sentences and the bits that sound like a corporate statement rather than a person. If you wouldn’t say it to a customer, rewrite it until you would. Finally, ask someone who doesn’t know your business to read it and tell you what you do. If their answer matches yours, you’re done.
Where to start
Pick one important page, probably your homepage or best-selling service. Highlight every adjective, rewrite every heading so it says something, and change every button to describe what happens next. It’s an afternoon’s work, and it usually shows how much of the rest of your website copy needs the same treatment.
If you’d rather someone else held the pen, our website content service writes copy from a short conversation with you. And if the problem is deeper, such as not being sure how to describe what makes you different, our naming and messaging work starts there.
