How to write website copy that gets strangers to ask you for a price
Website copy is not describing your business. It is answering the six questions a stranger is asking while they decide whether to keep reading — and answering them in the order they ask, above the fold, in language they would have used first. Most copy fails because it was written for the company rather than for that decision.
GigBlend11 min readUpdated
The six questions a visitor asks
- Is this for someone like me?
- What exactly do you do?
- What do I get, and when?
- Roughly what does it cost?
- Why should I believe you?
- What do I do next?
Every decision on the page — the headline, the order of sections, what goes in the FAQ, where the button is — follows from answering those six in that order. A page that answers number two beautifully and never gets to number five is a page that reads well and converts badly.
The headline is the whole job
For most service businesses, the headline should say what you do and for whom, in plain terms. Wordplay in a headline is a bet that the reader will stay for the second meaning; on a page they reached from a search result, that bet is usually wrong.
| Type | Example | When it works |
|---|---|---|
| Plain statement | Payroll for agencies with 10–200 contractors | Almost always. It is the safe default for search traffic. |
| Outcome | Close your month end in four days, not eleven | When the outcome is specific and you can evidence it. |
| Clever | Money, but make it make sense | When the reader already knows you. Rarely on a landing page. |
Test the headline against one question: could a stranger tell what you sell from it? If a competitor’s headline would work unchanged on your site, it is not yet your headline.
The eight blocks of a service page
- Headline and sub-head — what, for whom, and the reason it is better.
- The primary action — one button, one promise, visible without scrolling.
- Who it is for, and who it is not for. Naming an exclusion is the fastest way to make the right reader feel addressed.
- What you actually do, in the customer’s language rather than your internal vocabulary.
- What they receive — the deliverable, the format, the timescale.
- Proof — numbers you can stand behind, named work, quotes with real names, credentials.
- Price, or an honest account of how pricing works.
- The objections page — a FAQ that answers the questions that stop a purchase.
Write to the objection, not the benefit
Benefit-led copy is good advice as far as it goes, but it addresses what the buyer wants and ignores what stops them. The things that stop a purchase are almost always specific: “will I need to change my accountant”, “what if my data is a mess”, “how long before it is live”, “what does it cost when it goes wrong”. Each of those is a heading, and each heading you answer is a reason to fill in the form.
The cheapest way to find them is to read your own sales emails and call notes — the questions you are asked more than twice are on the page already in your head. The second-cheapest is to ask a colleague who is not in the business.
Cutting, which is most of the work
- Adjectives that cannot be checked: leading, innovative, seamless, best-in-class. Each one is a claim nobody believes, occupying the space a fact could use.
- The founding story, unless the founding is the reason to buy you. It belongs on an About page, which is read by far fewer people than the homepage.
- Sentences that announce themselves: “We are proud to announce that we…” — delete the announcement, keep the thing.
- Anything a competitor could paste onto their own site unchanged. That is the test for every sentence, not just the headline.
Reading it out loud, and the stranger test
Two checks catch almost everything. First, read the page aloud; anywhere you stumble, run out of breath, or hear yourself using a word you would not use in conversation, rewrite that sentence. Second, give it to someone who does not work with you, ask them to describe the business back, and pay attention to which of the six questions they answer wrongly. Their misreading is not their mistake — it is the page’s.
Doing it properly, or getting help
A single well-written landing page can be written in an afternoon once you know what the page is for. A whole site cannot, because it needs the same decisions made consistently across pages by someone holding the argument in their head. That is the point at which buying the work makes sense — not because writing is mysterious, but because it is a lot of decisions and it is hard to be the person who both knows the business and reads the page cold.
The website copy service on GigBlend is priced by page count with revisions included, and the deliverable includes the meta titles and descriptions for each page so the copy and the search listing are written together rather than bolted on at the end.
Questions people ask
- How many words should a homepage be?
- As many as it takes to answer the six buying questions and no more — for most small businesses that is a few hundred. Page length is less important than whether the answers are above the fold, and a short page that answers everything outperforms a long page that buries them.
- Should I show prices on my website?
- If your price is stable and comparable, yes — hiding it costs you enquiries from people who will not ask, and it costs you time from people who were never going to buy. Where price genuinely depends on scope, show how pricing works and give a range, with the reason for the range.
- What makes website copy convert?
- Specificity, in that order: the right reader recognising themselves, a clear account of what they get and when, evidence they can check, and the objections answered before they are raised. Not design, not word count, and not a more urgent call to action on a page that has not earned one.
- How is website copy different from content writing?
- Copy sits on pages you own and is trying to produce a decision; content answers a question someone searched for and is trying to earn the visit. They use different evidence and are measured differently, which is why good copywriters and good content writers are often not the same person.
- Can I rewrite my own website copy?
- You can, and for a single landing page you should — nobody knows the objections as well as you do. Where it goes wrong is scale: after the fourth page, the argument gets blurred, and the writer stops reading as a stranger. That is the point where an outside reader is worth more than a better writer.