Writing
How to Write Content for a Contractor Website
Write to answer the four things a homeowner checks before they call: what you do, whether you work here, whether you have done this before, and what happens if they get in touch. Every page on the site is one of those four answers in more detail.
What Homeowners Need to Know Before They Contact You
They are deciding whether calling you is worth the small social risk of a sales conversation. Everything you write is either reducing that risk or adding to it.
Contractor websites are usually written from the inside out. They open with how long the company has been trading, list the services in the order the owner thinks of them, and end with a form. That order answers the company's questions rather than the customer's.
The customer arrives holding a specific problem and a specific address. Until the page confirms you deal with that problem, in that place, they are not reading anything else you wrote.
The four questions, in the order they are asked
Nearly every visitor works through these in sequence, and abandons at the first one the site fails to answer.
- Do you do the thing I need doing?
- Do you come out to where I live?
- Have you done this before, and can I see it?
- What happens if I get in touch, and how quickly?
What they are not asking
Nobody arrived wanting your mission statement, your commitment to excellence or your passion for the trade. Those sentences are on most contractor sites and they are read by nobody, because they carry no information a competitor could not also claim.
How to Write Your Homepage Message
The first line should name the trade and the area. "Roof repair and replacement across the Charlotte metro" does more work than any headline about quality or trust.
You have roughly one screen to establish three facts: what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you. Everything else on the home page is secondary to those, including the photograph.
Specificity is what makes it credible. Every contractor in the country can write "Quality workmanship you can trust". Almost none of them can write "Third-generation masons working the north side since the eighties", and the second one is unfalsifiable by a competitor precisely because it is true of you.
The opening line
Trade plus area, in plain words. If you can name the service and the place in eight words, do that and move on.
The paragraph under it
Two or three sentences on what kind of work you take and who you take it for. Residential or commercial, repairs or full replacements, the size of job you are set up for. This is the paragraph that stops the wrong enquiries.
What goes below
Your main services with a route into each, a few pieces of finished work, the reason to pick you, and the way to get in touch. In that order, and no longer than it needs to be.
If your home page opens with the words "Welcome to", you have spent your first line on nothing. So has everyone else who did it.
How to Write Clear Service Pages
One page per service line, each written as if the visitor arrived directly on it from a search, because most of them did.
A service page that assumes the reader came through the home page will skip context they never got. Each one has to stand alone: what the service is, who it is for, what it involves and how to ask about it.
Write in the words customers use rather than the words the trade uses. People search for a blocked drain, not for hydro jetting. Carry both, with the everyday phrasing in the heading and your professional term in the detail underneath.
What each service page needs to cover
Keep the structure consistent across pages so the reader learns it once, and vary the content completely.
- What the service is, in one sentence a stranger would understand
- The situations it applies to, described the way a customer would describe them
- What the work involves, at a level that sets expectations without turning into a manual
- What you need from them before you can price it
- Anything commonly assumed to be included that is not
- The way to ask about this specific service
The part most people skip
Say what you do not do. A page that states plainly that you do not take on jobs under a certain size, or do not work with a particular material, saves you calls and makes everything else on the page more believable. Boundaries read as confidence.
Resist writing a separate page for every town you serve. Ten near-identical pages with the place name swapped are thin content, they compete with each other, and they are transparently mechanical to a reader.
What to Include on Your About Page
The about page is where a cautious customer goes to check you are real. Give them people, place and proof rather than a company history.
It is one of the most visited pages on a contractor site and one of the least considered. Visitors arrive on it specifically to decide whether to trust you, which makes vagueness expensive.
Photographs of the actual crew and actual trucks outperform anything else you can put there. A stock image of a smiling person in a hard hat is recognised instantly as a stock image, and it undoes the page.
- Who runs the business and how they got into the trade
- How long you have been operating, stated as a fact rather than as a claim
- The area you work and where you are based
- License, insurance and bonding, with the numbers where they apply
- Certifications and trade memberships you genuinely hold
- A photograph of the real team, even if it is three people and a truck
- How you work: who turns up, how you communicate, what to expect
Do not publish a certification, an award or a founding year you cannot support. It is the easiest thing on a website to check and the most damaging thing to get caught inventing.
How to Describe Projects and Use Testimonials
A project is worth publishing when you can say what the problem was, what you did and what it cost the customer in time or disruption. Photographs alone are decoration.
Most contractor project pages are a grid of images with no words. The images prove you did something; the words prove you understood it. A short description naming the constraint, the approach and the outcome turns a photograph into evidence of judgement.
Testimonials work on the same principle. "Great job, highly recommend" is worth almost nothing. A review that names the specific thing that went right, or the specific worry that turned out to be unfounded, is worth ten of them.
Writing up a project
Three or four sentences is enough. What the customer wanted, what made it difficult, what you did, how it turned out.
Using reviews you already have
Most contractors have reviews sitting on platforms and never bring them onto the site. Quote them accurately, attribute them the way the platform does, and do not edit them into better prose. An awkwardly worded real review reads as real.
The line you do not cross
Never write a testimonial. Never attribute one to initials or a first name that belongs to nobody. Never present another company's project as yours. A site with no testimonials is fine; a site with invented ones is a liability that will eventually be discovered.
How to Write Clear Calls to Action
Name the action and what follows it. "Request an estimate" tells somebody what they are about to do; "Learn more" and "Submit" tell them nothing.
The most common mistake is having several competing calls to action on one screen. Call now, request a quote, book a consultation, download something: given four choices, most people take none.
Pick the one action that suits the page and repeat it. A service page for emergency work should be pushing the phone. A page about a large design and build project should be pushing the enquiry form, because nobody is calling about a pool at eleven at night.
- One primary action per page, chosen for the intent of that page
- Wording that names what happens: request an estimate, book a service call, ask about a project
- A second, quieter option for people who are not ready, such as the phone number
- The same action repeated down a long page rather than four different ones
- A statement of what happens next, near the button, in plain words
Avoid urgency you have not earned. Countdowns, limited slots and prices about to rise are read as pressure, and the customers most put off by them are the ones with the largest jobs.
Frequently asked questions
Who should write the content for a contractor website?
Whoever knows the work should supply the facts, and whoever knows how people read should shape them. On our projects that means you brief us and we draft it.
The common failure is not bad writing. It is a site that never gets finished because the owner was handed an empty template and asked to fill it in between jobs.
How long should a contractor service page be?
Long enough to answer what the service is, who it is for, what it costs roughly, and what happens next. For most trades that is 400 to 800 words.
Padding to hit a word count is visible, and it pushes the thing a visitor came for further down the page.
What should I write on the about page?
Who runs the business, how long you have been doing this, where you work and what you are licensed and insured for.
Skip the founding story unless it explains something a customer cares about. The about page is a credibility check, not a memoir.
Do I need to write new content if I already have a website?
Usually some of it. Existing copy is worth keeping wherever it is specific to your business and worth replacing wherever it could sit on any competitor's site.
The test is simple: swap in another company's name. If the sentence still works, it was never doing anything.
Rather not write it yourself?
On our contractor projects the copy is drafted from your briefing and revised with you, so the site gets finished instead of sitting half-built while the season runs.
