The SiteRoot team7 min read
You can stand in somebody's driveway and explain a job so clearly that they book you on the spot. Then you open a blank page with About us at the top of it and write nothing for forty minutes, and eventually type "We are a family owned business committed to quality workmanship" because that is what everybody else's website says.
That is not a writing problem. It is a question problem. In the driveway, somebody asks you things and you answer them, which you are extremely good at. In front of a blank page you have to invent the questions and answer them at the same time, which is two jobs at once and the first one is unfamiliar. So stop trying to write. Answer questions instead. Here are the questions, a trick for getting the answers out of your head, and the one edit that matters more than all the rest.
The nine questions
Answer these out loud, in your own words, without trying to make them sound nice. This is the raw material for every page on the site.
- What do you do, in the words a customer would use, not the words your trade uses?
- Who do you do it for? Homeowners, builders, landlords, other businesses, a particular kind of client.
- Where? Actual suburbs, actual radius, and where you draw the line.
- What is the job people ring you about most?
- What happens after they ring? Step by step, including how soon, who turns up, and what they need to do.
- What does it cost? A range, a from price, a callout fee, an hourly rate, or just what the price depends on.
- What do you not do?
- Why should somebody pick you rather than the next one on the list? Said out loud, the way you would say it in the driveway.
- How long have you been doing this, and what were you doing before?
Nine answers is a whole website. Nothing on this list requires you to be a writer.
Say it into your phone instead of typing it
The trick that works for almost everybody: open the voice recorder on your phone, and answer the nine questions while you are driving between jobs or sitting in the ute with a coffee.
Then type up what you said. Not what you meant, not a tidied version. What you said.
Spoken sentences are better than written ones for this, and the reason is mechanical: when you talk you are aiming at a person, so you naturally include the things a person needs. When you write you are aiming at a page, so you start performing. The bloke who says "if you ring before about ten we can usually get there the same day" will type "prompt and reliable service", and the first one is worth ten of the second.
Lead with the answer, not with a welcome
Every page should start with the answer to the question that brought somebody there. Not a greeting, not a wind up, not a mission.
Weak: Welcome to our website. We pride ourselves on delivering exceptional service to our valued customers.
Better: We clear blocked drains across the northern suburbs, usually the same day. Ring us and we will tell you the price before we start.
The second one is not clever. It is the answer, first, which is all somebody scanning on a phone needs.
The one edit: could a competitor put their name on this?
If you only do one pass over your own words, do this one. Read each sentence and ask whether the business down the road could publish it, word for word, without changing anything.
If they could, the sentence is doing no work. Quality workmanship. Customer focused. Fully qualified and insured. No job too small. Competitive rates. Every one of those appears on thousands of Australian websites, which is exactly why none of them moves anybody.
The fix is always the same: swap the adjective for the fact behind it.
- Not "fast response". Instead: ring before ten and we can usually be there the same day.
- Not "we care about our customers". Instead: we put down drop sheets, we take the rubbish with us, and we ring you if we are running late.
Facts cannot be copied by a competitor unless they are also true for them, which is the entire point.
Use their words, not your trade's
Your customers do not know what you call things, and they are typing the symptom.
They search for power keeps tripping, not nuisance tripping on the RCD. Blocked drain, not drainage solutions. Sore tooth, not dental pain management. Teeth straightening, not orthodontic alignment. Help with a home loan, not residential lending solutions.
Put your internal term on the page once, for the people who use it, and lead with theirs. Writing the way your customer speaks is not dumbing anything down. It is the difference between being findable and being invisible.
Say what you do not do
The strongest trust line on most small business websites is the one almost nobody writes.
We do not do commercial. We do not take on anything under A$500. We do not do roofing, but here is who we would call. No emergency work on Sundays.
It reads as somebody who knows their business rather than somebody who will say yes to anything, and it quietly saves you the calls that were never going to turn into work.
The about page is the one place a story helps
Everywhere else, lead with facts. The about page is where a bit of human history earns its place, and three specifics beat a paragraph of sentiment.
How long you have been doing it. Where you are based, and whether you grew up around there. Why you started, in one honest sentence. If you spent twelve years in somebody else's business before going out on your own, say so, because that is the fact that makes you look like a safe pair of hands.
Four sentences is enough. Nobody is reading an autobiography before they ring a plumber.
Read it out loud before it goes live
Final check, and it takes five minutes. Read the whole site aloud.
Anything you would never say standing in front of a customer, cut it. Anything that made you wince, rewrite it as the sentence you would actually say. Use contractions if you use them when you talk. If a sentence takes two breaths, it is two sentences.
When the first draft came from a machine
Worth saying plainly, since we build the drafts. Any generated first draft, ours included, is a starting point and not a finished page.
The tell is always the same. Confident, pleasant, grammatically flawless sentences that could be about any business in the country. A draft cannot know that you only work north of the river, that you are the only one locally with a drain camera, or that you ring people when you are running late. Those are the details that make the page yours, and they only exist in your head.
So run the competitor test over whatever you start with. Every sentence that survives it is worth keeping, and every sentence that fails it is a slot waiting for a fact only you have.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
We ask you questions rather than handing you a blank canvas, because a blank canvas is where websites go to die. You answer a handful of things about your own business, and about 15 minutes later there is a whole site to react to, which is a much easier job than starting one.
Then you fix the words by asking. Change a line, add a service, swap a paragraph for what you actually said in the driveway. You see it in your preview before it reaches the live site, and it costs nothing, which matters more than it sounds like: the reason so many small business websites are out of date is that changing them used to mean emailing somebody and paying for an hour.
Writing about your own business never gets easy. Answering nine questions about it is completely doable, and that turns out to be the same thing.
