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12 October 2026

Writing Website Copy That Works for People and Search Engines

“Can you make the words sound a bit more professional?” It’s a fair request, and it usually makes things worse. A haulage firm’s homepage gets polished until it promises ‘logistics solutions delivered with a commitment to excellence’. Meanwhile a warehouse manager who needs four pallets moved by Thursday reads it twice and still doesn’t know if they’ll take the job. Good website copy is about being useful to the person reading it. Google is after much the same thing, which is handy.

In brief

Write for the customer first. That’s what search engines are trying to reward anyway.
Swap vague claims for specifics you could prove if someone asked.
Use the words your customers use, even when they’re not the ones you’d pick.
Short sentences, clear headings and links that say where they go will carry most pages a long way.

Start with the reader and their question

Every page has a reader with a job to do. Somebody wants to know if you’ll collect from their unit on an industrial estate. Somebody else wants to know whether a clinic treats running injuries, or if a café will take a booking for twelve on a Saturday. Write down who that person is and what they’re asking before you write a word of the page. Can’t think of anyone? The page might not need to exist.

Google wants the same thing. Its ranking systems are built to favour helpful, reliable information made for people over content written mainly to rank. There’s a self-check for site owners too, and the questions are the sort a good editor would ask. Is this original? Would you trust it? One of them even asks whether you’re writing to a set word count because you’ve heard Google prefers one. It doesn’t. So the job’s easy to describe and harder to do. Answer the reader properly, then stop. If you’ve already put together a brief for your new website, the section on who the site is for is a good place to start.

Use your customers’ words

Businesses describe themselves in their own language. Customers use theirs. A training provider might list a ‘Level 3 Award in Education and Training’ while plenty of the people looking for it type something like ‘teaching qualification for adults’. A physio clinic offers ‘musculoskeletal assessment’. The patient searches for a bad back.

Google’s starter guide makes the point that someone who knows a subject well may search with different words from someone who’s new to it, and suggests thinking about what a reader might type to find your page. Use both. Put the everyday phrase where people will see it and explain the proper term underneath. The best place to find those everyday phrases is your inbox. Read back through a few months of enquiries, note how people describe what they want, and borrow their wording. The reviews on your Google Business Profile are worth a read too, because customers tell you there exactly what they came for.

Don’t overdo it, though. The same phrase crammed into every sentence is tiring to read, and Google’s guide is clear that keyword stuffing goes against its spam policies. Use the phrase where it fits and move on. Working out which phrases belong on which page is part of any sensible SEO content strategy.

Swap vague claims for specifics

‘Quality service.’ ‘Competitive prices.’ ‘Second to none.’ ‘Your trusted partner.’ Everybody says them, so they tell the reader nothing at all. Specifics are what persuade. A courier might say it does same-day collections across a stated radius, with tail-lift vans for pallets, and that one sentence answers three questions. A restaurant that mentions its private room seats 24 and there’s a set menu for groups has probably saved itself a phone call.

Specifics come with a catch. If a customer would read something as a statement of fact, it needs to be true and you need to be able to show it. The CAP Code has applied to sales-related marketing on a company’s own website since 2011. Its rule 3.7 says you must hold documentary evidence, before you publish, for claims that consumers are likely to see as objective and that can be objectively proved. So ‘the quickest response times in the area’ needs figures behind it. ‘We always answer the phone’ needs you to actually answer it. Obvious exaggeration that the average customer wouldn’t take literally is allowed, as long as it doesn’t materially mislead. If you can’t back a number up, leave it out. That’s general information, and it isn’t legal advice.

Make it easy to read

Plain English isn’t dumbing down. GOV.UK makes it mandatory across the whole site, and its guidance points out that people with higher literacy levels prefer it too. Specialists can understand the complicated version. They’d just rather not read it when there’s an alternative. Solicitors, engineers and finance directors are busy. They’ll be glad you got to the point.

A few of the GOV.UK habits travel well to a business site. Split sentences that run past about 25 words. Keep paragraphs to five sentences at most. Use the active voice, because ‘we’ll ring you back within the hour’ lands harder than ‘calls will be returned’. Pick the short word when it does the job. And bin the buzzwords. ‘Solutions’ covers everything, so it means nothing.

The accessibility guidelines lean the same way. WCAG 2.2 has a Level AAA criterion on reading level, which asks for simpler supporting content or a simpler version when text needs reading ability beyond lower secondary education. Level AA is the usual target, and AAA isn’t generally expected. It’s a decent yardstick all the same. There’s more on the standards in our post on website accessibility and WCAG 2.2.

Give skimmers something to hold on to

Plenty of visitors won’t read a page from top to bottom. They hunt for the bit that answers their question, and headings are the signposts. WCAG asks for headings that describe their topic or purpose, because clear ones help people find what they’re after. ‘Our approach’ could sit above anything. ‘How we price a house removal’ tells you exactly what’s coming.

Search is no different. Google’s starter guide wants long content broken into paragraphs and sections with headings, so people can find their way around. There’s no magic number of headings, though, so don’t chop a page into fragments just to have more. Service pages are where this matters most, and we go into their layout in our article on service pages that turn visitors into enquiries.

Links are copy too. Google suggests link text that’s descriptive, fairly short and still makes sense if you read it on its own. ‘Click here’ and ‘read more’ fail. ‘See which postcodes we cover’ passes. Our post on linking between your own pages explains how this helps search engines make sense of a site as well.

The words people see before they click

Your page title and meta description are often the first bit of your copy anyone reads, sat in a list of search results next to your competitors. They deserve the same treatment as the page. A charity’s donations page titled ‘Home’ wastes the space. ‘Furniture donations collected free’ tells a searcher they’ve found the right place. We go through how Google decides what to show in our piece on how Google uses title tags and meta descriptions.

Where AI drafting fits

Lots of owners now use AI tools to get a first draft down, and Google doesn’t forbid it. What it cares about is whether the result is accurate, relevant and good, so everything should be fact-checked before it goes live. That goes for titles, meta descriptions and image alt text as well as the page itself. Pumping out lots of pages that add nothing for users is another matter. Google says that can count as scaled content abuse under its spam policies.

The bigger worry is that AI drafts tend to sound like everybody else’s. They’re often stuffed with exactly the vague claims you’ve just been told to cut. Use a tool to get past the blank page if it helps. Then put back what only you know. Your prices. Your turnaround times. The question every new customer asks in the first five minutes. The jobs you won’t take on.

Getting the words right on your site

Words often get left until late in a website project, which is odd when they’re the part visitors actually read. If a new site is on the cards, our guide to planning a business website from first idea to launch explains why the copy should come before the design. We write and structure copy as part of our website design work, so pages read well for customers and make sense to search engines. If your current pages aren’t pulling their weight, get in touch and we’ll take a look.

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Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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