You can still spot copy written for a search engine rather than a person. It has a particular rhythm.

“When it comes to bathroom fitting in Ware, our bathroom fitting Ware team offers the best bathroom fitting Ware has to offer.” Nobody has ever spoken like that, nobody enjoys reading it, and it has not worked for well over a decade. Yet it is still being written, because the instinct behind it, that a page ranks by containing the phrase, is remarkably persistent.

What ranks now is the page that most usefully answers the thing somebody was trying to find out. Which is harder to fake, and considerably easier to write, because it turns out you already know the answers.

Answer the question in the first paragraph

Somebody arriving from a search has a question in mind. The page should answer it before it does anything else.

Not a welcome message. Not the history of the company. Not “in today’s competitive marketplace”. The answer, in the first two or three sentences, in plain words. Then the detail, the caveats, the examples, and eventually the invitation to get in touch.

This feels wrong to a lot of business owners, because it gives away the punchline. It is exactly right, because the person who reads the answer and thinks “that is a clear explanation from somebody who knows” is the person who scrolls down and rings you. The person who has to wade through three paragraphs of preamble has already gone back to the results.

Then answer the next four questions

The pages that hold their position tend to be the ones that anticipate what somebody wonders next.

If the page explains what something costs, the next questions are what changes the price, how long it takes, and what happens if it goes wrong. If it explains a process, the next questions are what you need from me, how much disruption there is, and who does the work.

You already know these, because you answer them on the phone every week. Writing them down is the single most valuable thing you can do to a page, and it is why the best pages are usually written by whoever does the job rather than by a copywriter working from a brief.

Headings that are questions

Use headings to break the page into the questions it answers, phrased the way somebody would ask them.

That does three things at once. It lets a reader jump to the part they care about, which is what most people do. It makes the page easier to write, because each heading is a small brief. And it lines up naturally with the way people phrase searches, without anybody having to force a phrase in.

One page, one subject

A page that tries to cover everything ranks for nothing.

The instinct to make one long page covering all your services is understandable, particularly on a small site. It leaves you with a page that is vaguely about six things, which is beaten every time by six pages that are precisely about one thing each.

The opposite instinct is worse, though. Creating a near-identical page for every town in the county, with the place name swapped, is the oldest trick in local search and it has been recognised for years. It also reads terribly to the one thing that matters most, which is a human being deciding whether you seem competent.

If you genuinely work in several places, the honest version is a proper page for each place you actually work in, with something real on it: the jobs you have done there, the parking situation, the local quirks, the people you work with. If you cannot write anything specific about a town, that is a good sign the page should not exist.

Read the page out loud. It sounds like a small thing and it catches almost everything: the repeated phrase, the sentence that exists to hold a keyword, the paragraph that says nothing. If you would be embarrassed to say it to a customer standing in front of you, do not publish it.

The title of the page and the short description underneath it are what somebody actually sees in the results. They are frequently an afterthought, and they are the only part of your page most people ever read.

Write the title for the person, not the algorithm. Say what the page is and where you are, in words that would make sense read aloud. Keep it short enough not to be cut off, put the important part first, and do not stuff your business name into the front of every one.

The description does not affect ranking directly and it very much affects whether anybody clicks. Treat it as one sentence of advertising copy: what the page gives them, and why it is worth their click over the nine others.

Length is a symptom, not a target

There is no correct number of words, and any advice that gives you one is guessing.

A page should be as long as it takes to answer the question properly and then stop. Some questions take three hundred words. Some take two thousand. Padding a thin page to hit a number makes it worse, and cutting a thorough page to look tidy makes it less useful.

The test is whether a reader gets to the end with their question answered and no obvious follow-up left hanging.

Improve rather than multiply

When a page is not performing, the instinct is to write another one. Usually the better move is to make the existing one properly good.

Add the questions it does not answer. Cut the paragraphs that say nothing. Put the answer nearer the top. Add the specifics, the numbers, the photographs of actual work. A page that has been genuinely improved and has existed for two years will beat a new page on the same subject almost every time.

Where to start

Take the page that matters most commercially, print it, and read it as somebody with the problem it addresses. Mark every sentence that does not tell them something. Then write the three questions they would have next, and answer those at the bottom.

That is usually an hour, and it does more than a month of tinkering with phrases.

If you want somebody to go through your main pages and say honestly which are earning their place, get in touch, or read more about how we approach search.