The proof a stranger will actually believe

What a stranger is actually doubting

By the end of this lesson every claim on your site will sit in one of two piles. The ones a stranger can check for themselves in under a minute, and the ones they have to take on trust. The second pile either gets something attached to it or comes off the page.

It is worth being precise about what the doubt is, because most sites answer the wrong version of it. A stranger reading your site is not really wondering whether you are good at the work. They assume you probably are — everyone says they are, and there is no way of telling from a website anyway. The question is colder and narrower than that. If this goes wrong, is there anything I can do about it. Am I dealing with a business, or with a mobile number.

Everything below is an answer to that question. A number they can type into a public register. A figure they could hold you to. A document with its own exclusions written down. A review from somebody with a name and a town. None of it is flattering, and that is the point — the flattering material is exactly the material nobody believes.

What to have to hand

Your company number

If you trade as a limited company. It is on the incorporation certificate and on anything Companies House has ever sent you, and it is public information regardless of whether you publish it.

Every scheme you are genuinely on

Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, FENSA, a waste carrier registration, a trade body. Collect the membership numbers, not just the names. The names are the part that does not work.

Your current insurance schedule

You want the type of cover and the amount, and you want to check the dates have not quietly run out while you were busy.

Your guarantee, written down

If it exists only as something you say on the doorstep, this is where you write it out. How long, what it covers, what voids it, who to ring.

Somewhere your reviews already live

A Google profile, Checkatrade, a trade body directory. You need a place a reader can go and see them without going through you.

Numbers somebody can look up

A registration number is the strongest thing you can put on a website. It costs nothing, it takes one line, and most sites leave it off. It works because it is checkable — the reader does not have to believe you, they can open the register in another tab and watch your name come back.

Which is also why it only works with the number attached. A badge on its own is a picture of a badge. Anyone can save one off a search and drop it in a footer, and enough people have done that over the years that a row of logos with nothing underneath now reads as decoration. The number is what turns it back into evidence.

Put them where somebody looking for them would look: near the top of the about section, and again in the footer. Not in a separate accreditations page nobody opens.

Tip. Write the number beside the name in plain text, not inside the logo image. A number baked into a picture cannot be copied, cannot be read aloud by a screen reader, and cannot be found by somebody searching the page for it.

Note. Publish only the schemes you are actually on today. A lapsed membership is worse than none, because the reader who checks it finds a record saying you were removed, and that is a far louder fact than the one you were trying to make.

Insurance, said plainly

Public liability is what customers mean when they ask whether you are insured, and the honest version of the answer is one sentence with a number in it. The word insured on its own is not a sentence. Fully insured is worse, because it means nothing and reads as though it was written specifically to sound like it did.

So write the cover and the amount. Then write the part almost every site leaves out — who it protects and what it does not stretch to. A customer who understands that public liability covers damage you cause rather than a job you do badly is a customer who then asks about your guarantee, which is the next section and the one you want them on.

• The type of cover and the figure: public liability of two million pounds, rather than the adjective on its own.
• Employers' liability with its own figure if anybody works for you, which is a legal duty rather than a selling point — saying so plainly is fine.
• Professional indemnity if you design as well as install, because that is the cover that answers a specification going wrong.
• That the policy is current, and when it renews if you are content to say.
• That a copy of the certificate goes to anybody who asks, and then send it when they do.

Note. Keep the certificate itself off the page. It carries a policy number and often a home address, and a downloadable one has a way of turning up under somebody else's name. The claim belongs on the website. The document belongs in a reply to whoever asked.

Guarantees with their terms in the open

A guarantee in a yellow banner is not a guarantee, it is a typeface. What makes one believable is the boring half: the part that says when it does not apply, and who is still standing behind it if you are not.

Three things get called a guarantee and they are not the same thing. Separating them on the page is itself a signal, because only somebody who has read their own paperwork knows the difference. Your workmanship cover is you, and it is worth exactly what your business is worth in year four. A manufacturer's warranty belongs to whoever made the material, and usually only applies if the product was registered inside some window you have already forgotten about. An insurance-backed guarantee is an insurer holding your workmanship cover up if you stop trading, and it is the only one of the three that outlives you.

Then write the terms out. Not the whole document — five lines is enough, with the full thing available to anybody who asks for it.

• How long it runs, and whether a repair and a full replacement get different lengths.
• Whether it transfers when the house is sold, which both buyers and sellers ask about.
• What voids it: another trade working on the same thing, alterations, maintenance nobody did.
• How a claim is made, and how quickly somebody turns up after one.
• Whether it is registered with a scheme, and what the customer is handed on the day.

Note. Exclusions are the proof. A guarantee that appears to cover every eventuality is one a careful reader discounts entirely, because they have met that document before. Write down the four things that void yours and the other twenty lines start reading as real.

Reviews that name the job and the town

A believable review names something. The job, the town, the month, and one detail nobody would have bothered to invent — the skip that could not get down the lane, the boiler that turned out to be a different model to the one on the paperwork. Specificity is the entire mechanism. Praise is free; detail is not.

Put them somewhere they can be traced back. The arrangement that works is a handful of real quotes on the page, each carrying a first name and a town, sitting above a link to wherever the full set lives. The link does more work than the quotes do, because it says the ones you chose are a sample rather than the complete supply.

You will also get better reviews by asking better. A message the evening the job finishes, naming the two things it would be useful to have mentioned, produces a paragraph about the leak and the timescale instead of three words about being lovely.

• A first name at minimum, and the town.
• What the job was, in the customer's words rather than in yours.
• A month and a year, so nobody has to wonder whether it is from 2015.
• A link to wherever it was originally posted, when it was posted anywhere.
• Different voices. Six reviews written in the same rhythm were written by one person, and readers hear it before they can say why.

Tip. Never edit a review beyond trimming it, and never trim it into a different meaning. If you would not be comfortable with the customer reading your version back to you, it has stopped being their review.

What reads as invented

None of the following is unusual, and none of it is subtle to the person reading. These are the specific patterns that make a careful customer close the tab, and they are common enough that most people have learned them without ever being taught.

Note. The last one catches people who did nothing wrong. A real quote is undermined by a bought photograph sitting next to it, because the reader judges the pair together and the picture is the half they can place. No photograph at all is better than somebody else's.

Why none of this may be invented

This is the one part of the course that is not a matter of taste. Everything above is advice you can weigh up and ignore. What follows is law, and the reason to say so is that a website feels like copywriting right up until the moment somebody treats a sentence on it as a statement about a real business, which is what it is.

Misleading a consumer about who you are, what you are registered with, or what a guarantee covers has been prohibited for a long time under consumer protection law. What changed in 2025 is enforcement rather than principle: the competition regulator can now decide a case and fine directly instead of having to go to court first, and fake reviews — writing your own, paying somebody for them, or knowingly publishing them — are named in the legislation rather than argued about case by case.

Registration numbers carry their own rules on top of that. Gas is the sharpest: doing gas work without being on the Gas Safe Register is a criminal offence, and showing the register's mark when you are not on it is a matter for trading standards rather than for a copywriter. A scheme number that is not yours is somebody else's, and the somebody else is who the register will name.

An insurance figure you do not hold is the one that hurts latest. Nobody checks it on the day they book. It gets checked after something has gone wrong, by a person whose floor is ruined, and by then the sentence on your website is not marketing — it is evidence about what you told them before they let you in.

The builder will not put any of that on a page for you. It is told never to invent a certification, a registration number, an insurance policy, a star rating, a review count or a years-in-business figure, and to write a plainly marked placeholder with one line saying what it needs instead. Testimonials sit under a different rule, and this is the gap worth knowing about: where no real business details were supplied, the build is told to write plausible ones rather than leave a hole in the layout. So a first draft can arrive carrying customer quotes nobody ever said. They are scaffolding for the design. Replace them with real ones or delete them before the site goes anywhere near a customer.

Tip. The quickest safe pass: read the site looking only at quotation marks and digits. Every quoted sentence needs a person behind it, and every number needs a source you could produce on request. Anything that fails either test comes off today and goes back on when you have the real thing.

Note. It is your name on the page rather than ours. If a number on it turns out to be wrong, it is your registration being questioned and your customer who was misled, and neither of those is answered by saying the site wrote itself.

How to tell you got it right

The test is not whether the page reads well. It is whether a stranger with a phone and five minutes could confirm what it says, and you cannot judge that by reading — you have to actually try it.

1. Write out every factual claim on the site on one sheet of paper. Numbers, memberships, cover, guarantee length, years trading, review counts. It is usually a shorter list than people expect, and that is already useful.
2. Against each one, write how a stranger would check it. If the honest answer is that they could not, mark it.
3. Take three of the checkable ones and do it yourself. Open the register, type the number, see your own name come back. Roughly one in five people find something out of date at this step.
4. For everything you marked, either attach the missing detail — the number, the figure, the source — or take the claim off the page. There is no third option, and a vaguer version of the same claim is not one.
5. Read the guarantee section as somebody whose work has failed in year three. If it does not tell them what to do next and who to ring, it is not finished.
6. Ask somebody who does not work with you to find your insurance figure and your guarantee length, without help. Time them. Anything over thirty seconds is buried.

Note. A short honest page beats a decorated one every time here. Two registration numbers, one insurance figure and three reviews with names on them will out-convert a wall of badges, and it is the version you can still defend in a year.

Common questions

I have not got any reviews yet. What goes in that section?

Nothing. Leave the section out until you have one real review, then put one real review there. An empty testimonial block filled with invented quotes is the single most damaging thing on a new trade site, because it is the part a doubtful reader inspects hardest.

The first build wrote testimonials I never received. Is that a fault?

It is the build filling a layout when it was given nothing real to fill it with, and it is meant to be replaced. Treat those quotes the way you would treat greeked text: useful for seeing the shape, not for publishing. Delete them or swap them for real ones before the site goes live.

Can I use my trade body's logo on the site?

Usually yes if the membership is current and you follow their rules on how it is displayed — most bodies publish those, and some supply the file. The logo is not what does the work, though. The membership number beside it is.

Should I put a scan of my insurance certificate on the page?

No. Put the cover type and the amount on the page in text, and send the certificate to anybody who asks. The document carries a policy number and often a home address, and once it is downloadable you have no say in where it turns up.