You already know the words. You say them all day.
The stage where most small business sites stall, often for months, with the design already finished.
Write down the questions first
For one week, note every question a customer asks you. On the phone, in the shop, in messages. Do not edit them and do not tidy the wording.
At the end of the week you have your site. Those questions are what people type, in the words they type them in, which is not a coincidence.
Answer them the way you would out loud
Say the answer to yourself, then write that. If a sentence would sound strange spoken to a customer standing in front of you, it is wrong on the page too.
This is the whole technique. The formal voice people reach for when they open a blank document is the thing that makes small business sites read like each other.
The five pages that carry it
What you do, with prices or a range. Where you are and when you are open. Who you are. How to reach you. And one page per thing you actually sell, because that is what somebody searches for.
Everything else is optional for a long time.
The words to take out
Quality, professional, solutions, passion, and any sentence beginning with a welcome. Every competitor has written them, so they distinguish nothing and take up the space where a fact could go.
Replace each one with something checkable. Not quality repairs but a 6 month guarantee. Not fast delivery but the courier named and the cost shown.
Say the price, or say the range
The commonest question is what it costs and the commonest answer is silence. A range with the reason it varies beats nothing, and it filters out the enquiries you did not want.
Then leave it alone for a week
Come back and cut every sentence that is not doing work. Almost nobody adds on the second pass, which tells you what the first pass is really for.
Questions worth asking
How long should each page be?
As long as the answer takes and no longer. A service page that answers the question in 200 words is finished, and padding it to look substantial makes it worse for both readers.
Should I write in Albanian, Italian or English?
In whichever your customers search in, which on this coast is often more than one. If you serve visitors as well as locals, one language is a choice to be invisible to the others.
Can I use AI to write it?
For a first draft of something you then rewrite in your own words, sometimes. Published as it comes out, it reads like every other site that did the same, which is the opposite of the point.
What if I am not a good writer?
Good writing here means clear, not literary. If you can explain the job to a customer on the phone you can write the page, and the phone version is usually better than the one people produce when they try.
Do I need to keep adding pages forever?
No. You need the questions answered, and then new pages only when new questions arrive. A site that stops growing because it is complete is fine, as long as the hours and prices stay true.
Send us what you have written, even if it is a list of notes, and we will tell you what is missing. Get a free audit.
Updated