How to plan and write your website content

Decide who writes

Before anyone designs a page, decide who writes the words. There are three choices: you, someone in the business, or a paid writer. Each has a cost. Writing it yourself costs your time. A paid writer costs money and still needs your time for facts and approval.

Write the answer in the planner. If a builder is quoting, they need to know whether the words arrive ready or whether writing is part of the job.

Draft in a sensible order

Draft the pages that carry the buying decision first:

1. What you sell, services or products. What you sell, who it suits, what happens next. This is the page visitors use to decide.
2. Home. A short summary of what you do, for whom and where, with routes to the other pages. It is easier to write once the services page exists.
3. Contact. How to reach you and what happens after someone gets in touch.
4. About. Who runs the business and why a visitor can trust it.
5. Questions and answers. The questions that did not fit elsewhere.
6. Policy pages. A privacy notice and any terms, using the legal pages guide.

Write for the visitor's task

People arrive at a page with a question. Answer it in the first two sentences, then add the detail. A services page that opens with the history of the business makes visitors scroll to find what they came for.

Some practical habits help:

• Use the words customers use. If they say "boiler service", do not write "heating system maintenance solutions".
• Use headings that say what the section contains.
• Keep paragraphs short enough to read on a phone.
• Give facts you can stand behind: prices, areas covered, hours, qualifications.
• Leave out claims you cannot check, such as being the best in town.

Google's SEO Starter Guide recommends writing content that is easy to read and well organised, and describes a good meta description as short, unique to one page and covering the most relevant points. Those are writing habits, not tricks.

Images and the right to use them

For each page, list the images it needs and where they come from. The safest sources are photos you took, photos taken for you under an agreement that gives you the rights, and stock images with a licence that covers your use. A photo found through an image search is not free to use because it is easy to download.

If a photo shows a customer's home or a person who can be recognised, get their agreement first and keep a record of it.

Every image that carries information needs a text alternative, so that people using screen readers get the same information. That is one of the W3C's WCAG 2.2 requirements. Plan the descriptions along with the images.

Testimonials and reviews

If you plan to quote customers, the UK rules on reviews apply. Since April 2025, fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews are banned, and so is presenting reviews in a misleading way. The reviews guide explains what to do before you publish any.

Writing the services page, step by step

The services page carries the heaviest load, so it is worth a method:

1. List each service in a sentence a customer would recognise.
2. Under each, write who it suits and who it does not suit. Saying who a service is not for saves both sides a wasted call.
3. Add what the customer receives, in concrete terms: a visit, a report, a fitted kitchen, a 60 minute session.
4. Add how pricing works for that service: a fixed price, a starting point, or what a quote depends on.
5. End each service with the next step, such as a link to the contact form with that service named.

Read the finished page aloud. Anything you would not say to a customer face to face, such as "we deliver excellence", can go.

How long should each page be?

As long as the visitor's question needs, and no longer. A contact page may need a hundred words; a services page explaining three services in detail may need several hundred. Search engines do not reward length for its own sake. A page that answers its question clearly does its job.

Set a content deadline

Put a date in the plan for when all content is ready, and set it before the build starts. If you are working with a builder, ask how late content affects their schedule and price, and write the answer into the brief.

Check before you hand over

Before content goes to the builder, check:

• Every price, opening time, address and phone number has been checked against your other listings.
• You can back up each claim the pages make.
• Every image has a known source and permission to use it.
• Someone outside the business has read the main pages and understood them.

Then move on to choosing a platform, which depends partly on how you will update this content after launch.