What to write on your website when you feel you have nothing to say

A website project does not stall on technology. It stalls because at some point someone says “send the text”, and an empty file stays open for three months. It is a very common reason why new websites never get finished.

You are not a writer, but you can answer

The problem is not that you have nothing to say. The problem is the format: nobody can write a “company introduction” from nothing. Every business owner, on the other hand, can answer customers' questions, because they have answered them a hundred times on the phone.

So turn the task around. Do not write text. Answer questions. Speak aloud and dictate to your phone if writing is a struggle. Dictation makes better text than forced writing, because it sounds like you.

Ten questions

These are the same things a customer looks for on a website. Answer each one as briefly as you can.

1. What do you do? One sentence, the kind you would say to a neighbour.
2. For whom? Private customers, housing companies, industry, or all of these?
3. What services do you offer? Your three most common jobs are usually your website's service pages.
4. In what area? The town and the area you cover belong on the site, because customers search with them.
5. Why would someone choose you and not the bigger firm in the next municipality? Answer with proof, not an adjective.
6. How does the work proceed? What happens after the first contact, who turns up and in what order.
7. What does it cost, or what makes up the price? A price range or the billing basis is enough if an exact price cannot be given.
8. What kind of jobs have you done? Three examples with photos say more than a page of text.
9. What do you want the visitor to do: call, send a photo, book a time?
10. How can you be reached and when do you answer? If you do not answer during the working day, say so.

These answers make a five-page website. They also cover most of what a search engine needs to know what the site is about. One of the most common reasons a business does not show up on Google is, after all, that the site does not say what the business does and where.

Three questions that make the text yours

Anyone can fill in the previous ten. These three are the ones your competitors do not have, because they come from real calls.

FIRST QUESTION

What does a customer always ask you first on the phone? That question and its answer belong on the page exactly as they are.

FEAR

What is the customer afraid of? Delays, mess, a surprise bill, poor workmanship? Write on the page how you deal with exactly that.

LIMITS

What do you not do? Setting limits saves you unnecessary calls and makes your promise more believable.

A twenty-minute exercise

You can do this yourself today. It needs no tool other than your phone.

1. Take out your three most recent customer calls. Write down what was asked first in each. Do not tidy the wording.
2. Answer each question aloud into your phone's voice recorder, as if you were answering the customer. One answer can last a minute.
3. From the speech, write down only the sentences that contain a number, a time, a place or a concrete action. The rest can be thrown away.
4. From the remaining sentences, put together five points under the heading “How the work proceeds”. This is the skeleton of your service page.
5. Read the result aloud. If a sentence sounds like something you would never say on the phone, delete it.

The result is not pretty, and it does not need to be. It is raw material from which finished text is quickly made, and it contains information that no outsider could have invented for you.

Three ways text goes wrong

Writing about yourself, not the customer

“We are a quality, customer-focused operator founded in 2008.” That sentence fits any company in any country, so it says nothing. Replace it with what the customer gets: “We replace your bathroom tap on the same day you call in the morning.”

Promising “quality” and “reliability”

Everyone promises these and nobody believes them. Replace the adjective with proof: warranty period in years, response time in hours, number of finished jobs, a certificate, a photo of work done.

Making the reader work

The phone number is in the footer, sixth line from the bottom. Opening hours are in a PDF. The contact form has eleven fields. Every extra step drops some of the visitors.

Photos are half of the content

Photos taken with your own phone at real job sites almost always beat stock photos. The smiling office worker from a photo library only tells the reader that the site had nothing genuine to show. Take ten photos at your next job: before, during, after. That is enough for the whole site.

If you have no photos and no time to take them, tell your provider straight away. Text can carry a site without photos, but a bad photo carries nothing.

When content can be outsourced

Writing the content can be given to someone else, but the answers to these questions cannot be outsourced, because they are in your head. The most common and effective split is this: you talk on the phone for fifteen minutes, the provider writes the first version, you correct whatever is wrong. Correcting is much faster than starting from nothing, and the result still sounds like you.

This is how the one-week delivery model works in practice: the content is not waited for, it is interviewed out of you. With the website subscription, I write the texts for you in exactly this way.