How to Write Website Copy in the Right Order

What Has to Be Decided Before You Write Anything?

Copy is downstream of positioning. That's the whole rule and everything below is what it means in practice.

When someone sits down to write a services page without having settled who the service is for, the page comes out describing the service. That's the only thing left to write about. The description is accurate. The reader can't tell whether it applies to them, so the page gets rewritten before long.

So the order runs: decide, then write. Y en ese orden. Deciding while writing is the default and it's why the page takes several attempts.

Step One: Who It Is For and Who It Is Not

The first decision is the one people skip hardest, because the second half of it costs something. It is also a positioning question, part of your website messaging strategy, before it is a writing one.

Naming who your work serves is comfortable. Naming who it doesn't serve feels like turning away money, especially on a site that's already producing silence. So the page gets written wide enough to include everybody and a page that includes everybody describes nobody. It's one of the most common website copy mistakes.

You have to be specific enough that someone rules themselves out. Compare two ways of saying who it's for. "For service-based businesses" costs nothing, sorts nobody and is how a website quietly loses you clients. "For founders with steady traffic and no inquiries" sends the wrong readers away before they reach your form, which saves you both a call.

This is also the decision the rest of the sequence depends on, the same one that decides what should be on your homepage. You can't rank what matters on a page until you know who is reading it. Why this kind of website copy converts is its own argument.

The Rest of the Sequence

There are four more decisions and they run in this order.

2. What each page's one job is. One conclusion per page. The services page is where someone decides your work fits their situation, the step that converts website visitors into clients. The about page is where they decide they trust you. When a page has two jobs pulling the reader in different directions, it does neither and you find out months later.

3. What you're really selling. Not the deliverables, the outcome, esa es la diferencia. People write the deliverables because the deliverables are knowable and the outcome takes work to articulate. The reader is buying the second one.

4. Where each page sits in the path. What did they read before this. What do they do after. Copy written page by page in isolation reads disconnected even when every page is good on its own. A service business website strategy treats the pages as one path, which is why how your website content is organized has to be settled first.

5. Then draft. Badly, fast, in your own voice, without editing. Your website structure is already settled by now. The draft is easier than people expect once one through four exist, because there's nothing left to decide while writing. Deciding before writing is how I run content strategy too.

What Does the Wrong Order Actually Cost?

What it usually costs is months.

The pattern I see is someone who writes it themselves, isn't happy with it, rewrites it, is still not happy. The site sits half-finished or underperforming for a season while they work up to the next attempt. Nobody sends an invoice for that. It's the more expensive version.

I've seen both versions with my own clients. On the project where we settled who it was for before anyone wrote a word, the copy took one round of edits. On the one where the copy came first, it went through several rewrites.

There's no number attached to this and I'm not going to invent one. What I can tell you is that the time that belonged to deciding goes into rewriting and the rewriting is what doesn't work.

Should You Hire a Copywriter?

Often, yes. And this is the part the rest of the internet can't tell you straight.

A lot of what ranks for this keyword was written by people who sell copywriting. Their advice about whether to hire a copywriter is shaped by the fact that they're the copywriter. I'm not one. Copy is part of the sites I build, so take this with that in mind.

Here is the honest answer. Hire one whose scope includes positioning. Failing that, have your positioning settled before you hire one.

That's the whole criterion. A copywriter handed unsettled positioning will produce beautiful copy for a business that hasn't decided what it is. You end up disappointed in work that was never the problem. A copywriter who does brand and messaging as part of the engagement is a different purchase. It's usually the right one if you haven't done step one.

And a good copywriter has technique that doesn't come from anywhere else. Rhythm, the way an objection gets handled before the reader has finished forming it, the reason one word outperforms its synonym. That's a craft. It's worth paying for once the decisions underneath it exist. Mailchimp's writing principles show some of the deliberate choices behind copy that reads as effortless: purpose, audience and what the reader needs to know get decided before anyone writes.

Can You Use AI to Write Website Copy?

Sometimes it's hard to start from a blank screen. AI helps with that and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What it doesn't do is know what it doesn't know about your business. Your positioning. Which clients you turn away and why. What twelve discovery calls taught you about the objection everybody has and nobody says outloud. None of that's in the prompt, so none of it comes back in the output.

The other thing is that it pulls toward the average of everything already published on the topic, which is the exact opposite of what a service business needs. And a model has to be trained. An untrained model gives you the middle of the road. Training one on your positioning and your voice changes what comes out and that's only possible if the positioning already exists.

So the same rule applies to the tool as to the hire. Use it after the positioning. Nothing it produces is final. It's a draft, nada más. Treating a draft as finished is where this goes wrong.

How Do You Know You're Ready to Write?

One test. It takes under a minute.

Say outloud who the page is for, in one sentence, the way you'd say it to someone sitting across from you. Digital.gov's plain language principles start with writing for your audience too.

If it comes out clean, you're ready. If you hedge, list three kinds of client or hear yourself adding but also, that's step one still open. The blank page isn't the problem in that case and no amount of staring at it will help.