Website Copywriting

A website that doesn't convert is an expensive business card. It exists. It has your name on it. It tells people what you do in the approximate way that a business card tells people what you do. And then it sits there, passively, waiting for someone to care enough to pick up the phone.

Most small business websites are built this way — by designers who are excellent at making things look good and genuinely uncertain about what the words should do. The result is a site that looks professional and converts like a pamphlet.

The copy is an afterthought. It fills the space the designer left for it. It says the things a business is supposed to say. And it moves nobody to do anything.

What Website Copy Is Actually Supposed to Do

Your website has a job. Probably several jobs, depending on the page. The homepage's job is to answer the question every visitor is silently asking — am I in the right place, and can I trust these people — and then move them somewhere specific. Each service page's job is to convince the visitor that this specific service is the right solution and this specific business is the right one to do it. The About page's job is to make you a person, not a business. The contact page's job is to remove every possible obstacle between the visitor and the action you want them to take.

None of those jobs get done with filler copy.

The Copy-First Approach

Most website projects start with design. The designer builds something beautiful, leaves placeholder text in the wireframes, and waits for the client to fill it in. The client writes something that sounds professional. The designer fits it into the layout. The site launches. Six months later the phone isn't ringing and nobody can figure out why.

The right order is copy first, design second. When the copy is written first — when you know exactly what each page needs to say, to whom, and in what order — the design can do its actual job: make the copy as easy to read and act on as possible.

I've worked with Miles Beckler and alongside Terry Dean. I've seen how sites built copy-first perform compared to sites where copy was retrofitted into a design. The difference isn't marginal.

What Website Copywriting Includes

A typical small business website engagement covers homepage, About page, two to five service or product pages, and contact page. Each page includes research, full copy, title tag and meta description, and one revision pass. Larger sites, e-commerce copy, and full site rewrites available — contact me to discuss scope and timeline.