Red Isle WebI will read an About page about a company's commitment to quality and integrity, then call the number at the bottom, and the fellow who picks up tells me he has been at this since 1998, that he will not touch vinyl because he cannot stand the stuff, and that he could be there Thursday. The second version is the one that would have sold me. It is sitting right there in the man's mouth and nowhere on his website.
This has got worse in the last couple of years, because a lot of that copy is now written by a chatbot, and the chatbots all went to the same school. Open four trades sites in one town and you will read the same four paragraphs in a slightly different order.
Write the way you would explain the work to somebody standing in front of you, then take out the parts you would never say out loud. The specifics you reach for in conversation, the years, the towns, the jobs you turn down, are what make a page sound like your business and nobody else's, and none of them will occur to a chatbot.
Why does every small business site sound the same?
The safe phrases are safe because nobody has ever lost a job over "quality service you can trust." They are also empty. Any business on the Island could paste them onto a page and they would fit just as poorly, and a customer reading a sentence that could belong to anybody learns nothing about you except that you were not sure what to say.
Google has been fairly clear that it does not care whether a person or a machine typed the words. Its published guidance asks whether a page adds substantial value next to the other pages already sitting in the results, and a paragraph your competitor could paste onto their own site plainly does not. Website copy was failing that test long before chatbots existed.
What makes copy sound fake?
"Committed to excellence" is what a business writes about itself when it cannot think of anything a customer would care about, and readers have skipped past it enough times to stop seeing it. A claim with nothing underneath it does most of the damage on a small business page.
Nobody has ever stood in a driveway and told a homeowner they were going to leverage their solutions. That vocabulary turns up anyway, the moment a business sits down to write about itself. When the same person who is easy to talk to on the phone goes stiff and formal on their own website, the reader feels the seam even if they could not name it.
How do I write it, then?
Picture a customer asking what you do and why they should go with you, and answer out loud the way you would answer it in the shop. Record it on your phone if that is easier. The rambling spoken version is almost always better than the brochure version, because your voice and your specifics are already in it. Tidy it lightly afterwards and keep the wording you used.
The single change that does the most is swapping adjectives for facts. "Quality craftsmanship" becomes "I have been framing houses on the Island since 1998." "Fast, friendly service" becomes "call in the morning and I can usually get to you the same week." Customers believe the second version in each pair because they could hold you to it. The same logic is why photos of the jobs you have done beat a list of the trades you offer.
"Won't that sound unprofessional?"
Formal writing on a small business site tends to read as though nobody is home. The customer is trying to work out whether you are somebody who will show up when you said you would, and a stiff paragraph about your commitment to excellence gives them nothing to go on.
Spelling and grammar still matter, and nobody wants to read six rambling paragraphs, so this is not a licence to publish the transcript. Tidy the recording up and keep the words.
The good news
You already know how to talk about your work, because you do it with customers all day. Nothing here asks you to become a writer or learn any marketing language, and the part people dread, sitting down to think of what to say, is the part you skip. Getting the version you say out loud onto the page is the whole job, and it costs you a voice memo and twenty minutes.
That is how I write the copy for the sites I build here at Red Isle Web, for Island businesses, at a one-time price with no monthly fee. You talk, I write it down. The site ends up sounding like whoever picks up the phone. Have a look at my work, or send me a note and I will tell you which lines on your current site I would throw out first.