How much to write, and where

Both ways to get it wrong

By the end of this you should be able to go through your own site and say of each block of text whether it is too thin to be useful, too long to be read, or about right — and know the sentence to type to fix it.

The first failure is the more common one. A heading that says Bathrooms, and under it: we fit bathrooms. A stranger learns nothing from that. Not whether you do the tiling or bring a tiler, not whether the old suite goes away in your van, not how long the house is upside down, not what it costs, not whether you come out to their village. So they leave and ring somebody whose page answered it, and you never find out that page existed.

The second failure is the one people are proud of. Eight paragraphs about the journey, the values and the commitment to excellence, sitting between the reader and the phone number. Nobody reads it, and it pushes down the four things they came for — so a site with too many words fails in much the same way as one with too few.

The workable middle is narrower than most people expect. Nearly all of a good trade site is written in blocks of forty to a hundred words, one block per thing a customer wanted to know.

Note. Length is not really what is being judged. A hundred words that say nothing are worse than twenty saying the call-out is eighty pounds and that you answer your own phone.

The four things that have to be in writing

Photographs can prove you did the work. They cannot answer any of these four, and a stranger will not ring to find out — they will assume the worst and move on. Everything else on a site is optional. These are not.

The four fit into about a hundred and twenty words in total. Most trade sites carry two of them, bury the third, and miss the fourth entirely — the fourth being the one that turns a reader into a lead rather than a visitor who thought about it.

What a stranger cannot leave without

What you do

Named jobs, in the words a customer would use. Not all aspects of plumbing — boiler swaps, bathroom refits, leaks under a solid floor.

Where you do it

Towns and villages, named. The North West is not an answer to the question do you come out to me.

Roughly what it costs

A call-out fee, a minimum charge, or a range for the two or three jobs you do most. Where a number does not belong is a section of its own below.

What happens next

Ring, text, or fill in the form, and when it gets answered. One sentence does it: I pick up between seven and six, and I text back in the evening if I am under a floor.

Note. A page with all four and nothing else works. Everything after them — the story, the values, the years on the tools — is there to make somebody comfortable, and comfort is worth much less than an answer to a person deciding at nine at night.

How long each part actually runs

Numbers, so that this is checkable rather than a matter of taste. These are the lengths that fit the space and get read, taken across the sort of pages that do well for trades. They are a place to start arguing from, not a rule.

Note. Those are per block, not per page. A services page carrying six blocks of sixty words is a good services page at three hundred and sixty. The fault is never the total — it is one block of five words and another of five hundred sitting on the same page.

Where a number earns its place

Prices are the thing people are told to add without being told where, and a number is not automatically an improvement. It earns its place exactly where it removes a call you did not want, or wins one you did. Everywhere else it is either meaningless or a hostage.

Settling it once also shortens the page around it. A block with a real figure in it can be brief, because the figure has done the work of three paragraphs of reassurance.

Numbers that belong on the page

• A call-out fee or a minimum charge. It filters harder than any amount of careful wording, and it costs one line.
• A rate that genuinely is per unit — per square metre, per socket, per window, per hour. If you quote from it yourself, it can go on the page.
• A range for the two or three jobs you do most, marked plainly as a range, with the thing that moves it named. A boiler swap between two and three thousand, depending on whether the flue has to move.
• What is not included. Scaffolding, parts, waste, parking, the certificate. Half of every argument about a price is about something nobody said was extra.
• When you want paying, and what you ask for before you start.

Numbers that do not

• A headline from price that no real job ever comes in at. The customer finds out at the quote and decides you were being clever, which costs you more than saying nothing would have.
• A figure for work that is genuinely bespoke, where the honest range runs from ten thousand to sixty. That is not information. It is a shrug with numbers on it.
• A price you would have to change every month. Anything moving with material cost belongs in a sentence — priced on the day, from the merchant's list — rather than a figure that goes quietly stale.
• A discount with a deadline on it. It reads as the trade that knocks on doors, and it will still be there in March, which reads worse.

Note. If you would rather publish no prices at all, say so on the page in one line and say what you do instead. Every job gets a written quote, usually within two days, answers the question. Leaving the subject out does not answer it — it moves it to the phone, where it costs you ten minutes each time.

The page that always runs long

About is where the eight paragraphs live, and there is a reason. It is the only page where nobody knows what to write, so it fills with what is easy to write: values, journeys, commitments, a passion for quality. Every one of those sentences is equally true of every firm in the trade, which is another way of saying none of them is about you.

The job of that page is narrow. Somebody is deciding whether to let a stranger into their house, or hand over three thousand pounds, and wants to know there is a person at the other end. A name. How long you have been doing it. Where you are based. Whether you are the one who turns up. One fact only you have.

That is one screen. A hundred and fifty words and a photograph of you will beat the long version every time.

• "I am Dave. I have been doing this since 2003 and I am the one who turns up."
• "Second generation — my dad started it in 1987 and I took it on in 2014."
• "Two of us and one van, which is why I only take one bathroom at a time."
• "Twelve years with British Gas before this, mostly boilers."
• "Company number 08812345, public liability to two million pounds."
• "I text when I am on my way, and I take my boots off at the door."

Note. A mission statement is a sentence written for the people inside a business. There is nothing wrong with having one. It is simply not what the person holding the phone came to find out.

How to cut it

Cutting is easier than writing and hardly anybody does it, which is why it is the fastest improvement available to most sites. Four passes, none of them slow.

1. Read it out loud, standing up, off the phone. Anything you would never say to a customer's face announces itself — you hear it before you see it.
2. Delete every sentence that would still be true if a competitor put it on their site. Quality workmanship, competitive prices, customer satisfaction, a wide range of services. None of them survives the test and none of them is missed.
3. Cut the first sentence of every paragraph and read it again. Most paragraphs warm up for a line before they say anything, and most are better off starting at the second line.
4. Swap the adjectives for facts. Highly experienced becomes twenty-two years. Fast response becomes I answer the phone until six. Fully insured becomes the figure.
5. Count what is left against the table above. If a service block is now nine words, it has been cut past useful, and the job, the timescale and the number need putting back.

Tip. Do it in that order. Cut first, then judge the length. Almost everything that reads too long is not too long at all — it is roughly the right length with the wrong sentences in it.

Asking for less, or for more

Changing the length is a sentence, the same as everything else. Asking for less works first time: name the page and say how short you want it.

Asking for more is where people go wrong. Do not ask for a longer section — ask for the missing fact. Make the bathroom section longer produces filler, because there was nothing more to say and something had to be found. Say that the old suite goes away in the van and it is usually four days, and you get a paragraph worth reading.

Length follows facts, and that holds everywhere. A thin section is usually a thin brief rather than a lazy build: three named jobs cannot produce eight sections with anything real in them. If the whole site reads thin, the fix is upstream, in what you said about the business.

• "Cut the about page to one paragraph. My name, how long I have been going, and that I am the one who turns up."
• "Every service block should say roughly how long that job takes. Add it."
• "Put the call-out fee in the first screen and take it out of the third paragraph."
• "This reads like a brochure. Shorter sentences, and take out anything a competitor could have written."
• "Add a section on landlord certificates: what it covers, what it costs, emailed the same week."
• "The home page says the same thing three times. Keep the version near the top and delete the other two."

Note. If the whole site reads slightly wrong rather than one part of it, that is tone rather than length, and cutting paragraphs will not touch it. Say the general thing in one sentence and let the whole site move together.

How to tell when it is right

The test needs another person and forty seconds, and it cannot be done in your own head. You already know what you do, where you go and what you charge, which is exactly the knowledge being tested for.

1. Hand your phone to somebody who does not know what you do for a living.
2. Let them read for forty seconds, then take it back off them.
3. Ask four questions: what does he do, where, roughly what does it cost, and what would you do next.
4. Every one they cannot answer is a place that needs words, and you now know precisely which words rather than guessing.
5. Then ask what they skipped. Whatever they scrolled past without reading is what to cut, however long it took to write.

Note. Four out of four and they still could not tell you anything about the person behind it is a different problem, and it is the one the next lesson is about. Answers get you the call. Proof gets you the job.

Common questions

Does writing more help the site get found?

A page that answers a real question does. A page padded out to a word count does not, and it reads as padding to a person as well as to a search engine. The pages that get found tend to be the specific ones — one job, one town, written the way somebody would ask for it out loud.

How long should the home page be in total?

Somewhere between three hundred and six hundred words for most trades, written in blocks of forty to eighty, with the phone number reachable without scrolling. Longer is fine if every block answers something. It is the empty blocks that make a page feel long, not the word count.

Should I write the words myself or let the builder do it?

Let it write, then cut. Reacting to something on a screen is far easier than writing from nothing, and the cutting pass is where your own voice gets in. What it cannot do is invent facts about you — the years, the fee, the towns, the van — so anything specific has to come from you either way.

Do I need a blog?

Not for the sake of having one. Most trade blogs are three posts from 2021 and they make the whole site look abandoned. If you want to write, write pages that answer questions you get asked on the phone, and let them be pages rather than dated posts.