How to write website copy: page by page, sentence by sentence

You have just had the website rebuilt. The design is new and the photos are lovely. The copy, though, is the old site's copy with a few stock phrases dropped in: “With years of industry experience, we deliver customer-focused, high-quality, innovative solutions.” Visitors read that sentence and learn nothing, because the same sentence is on your competitor's site.

This article covers how to write copy for a business website: the job of each page, search intent, headlines, benefits versus empty phrases, proof, Google's guidance on helpful content and E-E-A-T, AI-written text, titles and descriptions, readability and localisation. Every example sentence here is invented.

Every page has a job

Start with the job, not the words. Each page answers one of the visitor's questions and moves them to the next step. If you can't write a page's job in one sentence, its copy will be muddled too.

The second half of the job is that next step. End every page by telling visitors what they can do, and make the button say what happens. “Book a site survey” or “Download the datasheet” sets expectations before the click in a way that “Submit” or “Click here” never will.

Home page

The home page has to answer three questions on the first screen: what do you do, who is it for, and what should I do now? “Welcome” is not a headline. Don't try to say everything here; send people to the right page. A simple signpost (“For your factory or for your office?”) works far better than a long list of services.

Service and product pages

This is where the heavy lifting of the sales conversation happens. A service page should answer, in order, the questions a buyer asks before buying: what exactly is included, who it suits and who it doesn't, how the process works, what you deliver, what drives the price and why they should trust you. Ask your sales team for the ten questions prospects ask most in a first meeting. That list is usually the page's skeleton.

Product pages follow the same logic with different questions: dimensions, compatibility, care, delivery, returns. Pasted manufacturer text tells neither readers nor search engines anything new.

About page

The about page answers “Can I trust these people?” Vision and mission statements don't. Who you are (real names and photos), how long you have done what you do, how you work, which accreditations you hold and where you are based do. Include the founding story only if it tells today's customer something.

Contact page

The contact page is the shortest and most neglected page. Visitors arrive having already decided, so don't make it hard: a tappable phone number, the address with a map, opening hours and how quickly you reply. Ask only for the fields you really need, and if the form collects personal data, put the link to your privacy notice right next to it, as UK GDPR and the EU GDPR expect. UK limited companies also have to show details such as their registered name, number and registered office on their website; the contact or legal page is the natural home for them.

Search intent: what question did the visitor bring?

Searches on the same topic hide different intentions. Someone typing “what is epoxy flooring” wants information. Someone typing “epoxy flooring contractor Leeds” wants a supplier. Someone typing your company name already knows you. Show the first person a quote form or the second an encyclopaedia entry and you lose both.

The most reliable way to understand intent is to run the search yourself. Guides, company pages, map results or product listings? Google is already showing you what it considers useful for that query. The Performance report in Search Console tells you which queries your existing pages appear for, and unexpected queries are often a sign of a missing page.

The rule is simple: one page, one main intent. Rather than stretching a service page to answer “what is it” and supplier searches at the same time, write a guide for people researching and a clear service page for people buying, then link the two.

Don't bother sprinkling keywords. Copy that covers the subject fully, in the words your customers use, naturally covers the related searches. Repeating the same phrase in every paragraph wears readers out, and Google's spam policies explicitly list keyword stuffing.

Writing headlines and subheadings

People don't read web pages line by line; they scan, as Nielsen Norman Group's research on reading behaviour has shown for years. The eye moves across headings, bold text and lists, and stops when it finds what it came for. That makes headings the hardest-working words on the page.

• The main heading (H1) should say what the page is, not play with words. “Building the future together” could be anything; “Epoxy floor coatings for factories and warehouses” is something.
• The subheading answers the question the headline leaves open: for whom, where, with what difference. For example: “Across Yorkshire, applied over a weekend so production doesn't stop.”
• Subheadings should follow the visitor's questions. Someone reading only the subheadings should understand what the page says.
• Question headings work well in FAQs. Turn every heading into a question and the page reads like an exam paper.
• Build the heading hierarchy for meaning, not looks. Using an H2 just to make text bigger misleads screen-reader users and search engines alike.

Benefits, not features, but not empty benefits either

The classic advice: write benefits, not features. “24/7 monitoring centre” is a feature; the benefit is that someone actually looks when the alarm goes off at midnight. The advice is right but incomplete. The more abstract the benefit, the emptier the copy. “Your peace of mind is our priority” is a benefit statement too. It just says nothing.

A good sentence ties the benefit to a concrete feature or a piece of proof. Ask yourself: could my competitor write exactly this sentence? If yes, it isn't about you. All the examples below are invented:

What the right-hand sentences share is that, if true, they can be checked. Which brings us to proof.

Proof and specifics

Visitors believe your evidence, not your claims. Proof doesn't have to be a long client list; small, verifiable details do the job:

• Numbers: years trading, projects completed, branches, team size. Use only figures you can verify, and keep them current.
• Accreditations such as ISO certificates, licences and authorised installer status, with certificate numbers and expiry dates where possible.
• A step-by-step description of how the work is done persuades far more than “our professional team”.
• Real photographs of the team, the premises, before and after. Stock photography is not proof.
• Reviews and case studies, with the client's permission, their real name and concrete detail.
• Saying what you don't do makes people trust what you say you do.

Proof has a legal side too. In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority's remit covers marketing claims on companies' own websites, and rule 3.7 of the CAP Code requires marketers to hold documentary evidence for objective claims before they publish them. “The UK's leading supplier” or “the fastest delivery” should only appear if you can substantiate it. If in doubt, check with your legal adviser.

What Google wants: helpful content, E-E-A-T and AI

Google's Search Central page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content says its ranking systems aim to favour content made to benefit people rather than to manipulate search rankings, and it offers sets of questions to ask yourself. A few of them: does the content provide original information, research or analysis? Does the title describe the content without exaggerating? Would someone arriving directly find it useful? Will readers leave having learned what they came for, or will they need to search again?

The same page lists warning signs of search-engine-first content: writing mainly to attract search visits, summarising others without adding anything, changing dates to look fresh, writing to a particular word count. Asked whether Google has a preferred length, the page simply says no.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Google says trust is the most important, with the others contributing to it. E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor in itself. It is a framework Google's search quality raters use when assessing content, and those raters have no direct effect on rankings. On topics that can affect people's health, finances or safety (Google calls them YMYL, “your money or your life”), it carries more weight.

On a business website that translates into practical steps: make it visible who wrote or reviewed the copy, show their relevant experience, be clear about who the company is and how to reach it, and keep the information accurate and current. Google frames this as the questions who, how and why.

Copy written with AI

Google's position is clear: it looks at the quality of content, not how it was produced. Its Search Central guidance on generative AI content says AI can help with researching a topic and adding structure to original content. Using AI to generate many pages that add nothing for users, on the other hand, may fall under the scaled content abuse section of its spam policies.

The same guidance recommends checking AI-generated text by hand before publishing, including title elements, meta descriptions, structured data and image alt text. That matches what we see: AI speeds up a first draft, but it knows nothing about your experience on the ground, the questions your customers ask or your verified facts. An unedited AI draft usually reads like the left-hand column of the table above.

Title tags, meta descriptions and readability

The title tag is the main source of the clickable headline in search results. Google's documentation sets no length limit on the title element, though the displayed title is truncated to fit the device. When building the title link, Google can also use the page's main visible heading, the H1, the og:title tag and the anchor text of links pointing to the page, so your title won't always appear word for word.

• Give every page its own title that describes it clearly; avoid vague titles such as “Home” or “Services”.
• Don't stack repeated keywords; Google cites this as a bad practice.
• Add the brand at the start or end, after a short separator.
• Write the title in the same language as the page.

Meta descriptions have no fixed character limit either. Google mostly builds snippets from page content and uses the description when it describes the page more accurately. Write a separate description for each page with information specific to it (what is offered, to whom, where): a sentence, not a keyword list.

Readability

Readability isn't about intelligence; it is about respect. Short paragraphs, one idea per sentence, “we do” instead of “is carried out”, abbreviations spelled out, lists only for real lists. Put the key information at the start of the paragraph; answers hidden at the end go unread. Then read the copy on a phone: a paragraph that runs to three lines on desktop fills the screen on mobile.

Localising a multilingual site, and the style guide

Translation and localisation are different things. A well-translated but unlocalised text can be flawless and still read as foreign. German readers look for the Impressum, American readers write “inquiry” rather than “enquiry”, customers in the Gulf want to know your working week. Currency, units, date and phone formats, examples, even which kind of proof persuades best, all change from market to market. Sentence structures carried over literally from another language make copy heavy; rewriting in the target language usually beats translating.

Google's advice for multilingual sites is practical: use a single language for content and navigation on each page, don't translate only the menus while leaving the main content in one language, and let visitors choose their language rather than redirecting them automatically. Connecting language versions with hreflang markup is a job for the technical team. Publishing raw machine translation loses readers and edges towards what Google's spam policies say about scaled content.

The style guide

Any site written by more than one person needs a style guide. It doesn't need to be a book; two or three pages will do:

• Voice and address: do you write “we” and “you”, and does the company refer to itself by name?
• A glossary with the one correct spelling of product and service names, synonyms to avoid and abbreviations to spell out.
• Format rules for dates, times, numbers, currency, phone numbers and addresses, plus capitalisation in headings, and the choice between UK and US spelling.
• Banned words: unprovable claims such as “leading”, “best” and “unrivalled”, and jargon your readers don't use.
• A right and a wrong example for every rule.
• Notes across languages on how key terms are rendered and which sections are rewritten locally.

Where to start

1. Write the job of every page in one sentence. A page you can't describe is either unnecessary or should be split in two.
2. Get the ten questions prospects ask most from your sales team, and check whether your service pages answer them.
3. Run your main target searches and note what kind of results appear on the first page.
4. Apply the “could my competitor write this?” test to every claim on the home and service pages.
5. Put proof next to every claim: a number, an accreditation, a process, a photo or a review.
6. Rewrite titles and meta descriptions page by page, and weed out duplicates.
7. Draft the first version of your style guide, and use it to localise other language versions instead of translating them.
8. After launch, watch which queries your pages appear for in Search Console and update the copy accordingly.

At AYTE Digital we start copy work before design, by talking to the sales team and studying the searches. If you would like your current site's copy looked at this way, we can begin with a few key pages and work out together what needs to change.