Website copy for a service business: what you say, in what order, to whom

When you type “website copywriting” into Google, you are not looking for fine words but for answers set out in the order a person who does not know you looks for them: what you do, who for, how it works and what they need to do next. For a service business, the copy takes the place of the shop window, because you have no product to put in a photo.

Many service websites sound the same: “a team of professionals”, “quality services”, “a personalised approach”. Sentences anyone could put their name to convince no one. We look for the wording your competitor could not copy without lying.

The conversation with the owner: the questions all the copy comes from

Nobody knows the business better than the person who started it, but few owners can write about it without falling into stock phrases. That is why we do not send a questionnaire. We talk, we record with your consent and we listen to how you tell it: the good sentences usually turn up when you are not thinking about the website.

We also talk to the person who answers the phone, read the reviews you have received and look at what your competitors write.

• Who usually comes looking for you, and what did they try before they got to you?
• What questions do you hear on the first phone call?
• Which jobs do you turn down, and why?
• How does working with you go, from the first message to the invoice?
• What can you prove: licences, years in business, photos from jobs, reviews?

Tone: how you would talk to the person if they were standing in front of you

Tone is not a matter of taste but of fit. Say you run an accountancy firm: the reader wants reassurance, so short sentences and no jokes. A home cleaning company can afford a warmer tone. We decide together between the informal and the formal form of address (Romanian has a “you” for each) and keep to that choice across the whole site.

We take out the jargon or explain it. At the end you also get a short tone of voice guide, with rules and examples, so that the pages you add yourself later sound the same.

The service page: the problem, the method, the next step

Every service that people search for separately gets its own page, built in the same order. It starts with the problem, in the customer’s words, not with the company’s history. It then says who the service is for and who it is not for, how you work step by step, what the person gets at the end and what the price depends on, even if you do not display a figure.

Then come the frequently asked questions and the call to action. On each page we put a single main call to action, worded concretely: “Request an assessment”, “Book a visit”, not “Contact”. Next to it we write what happens next: who replies, by what channel and what information the person should have to hand.

The home page has a different role: it steers the visitor towards the right service. The “About” page shows the people, not a timeline.

Real proof instead of superlatives

“Quality”, “reliability” and “professionalism” are claims everybody makes. We replace them with things that can be checked. If the business is just starting out and proof is thin, we do not fabricate it: we write in more detail about the method and about what happens if something does not turn out well.

In professions with their own advertising rules (medical, legal, financial) you check with the professional body what you are allowed to claim about yourself, and we write within those limits.

• Reviews: used with the author’s consent and not rewritten.
• Photos: from your own jobs, with your own people, with the consent of those who appear in them.
• Licences and certifications: named exactly, only those currently valid.
• Figures: only those you can show on request.
• Examples of work: without details that identify the customer, unless you have their consent.

Website copywriting: copy written for search too, not just for looks

Before writing, we look at what people type. If the website already exists, Google Search Console shows the searches it appears for. For new topics we use Google Keyword Planner, the tool in Google Ads that estimates, approximately, how often a phrase is searched for. Each page gets a topic and an intent: the person wants to find out, to compare or to order.

From this come the page title and the meta description (the lines that appear in search results), the section headings and the words in the text. The search phrase appears where it is natural, without forced repetition. The copy is done before the design, so that the designer works with real content, and we hand it over divided into sections, ready to go into WordPress.

Copy alone does not lift a website in Google: the technical side and the competition count too. What we can track is whether the pages bring in form enquiries and phone calls.

This is a typical project description: it shows how we usually approach this kind of work and does not present a project carried out for a particular client. Every real project starts from your company’s situation, and the stages, timescales and price are agreed after the initial discussion.