That is the whole problem, and it is why "what should I put on my website" gets answered so badly. The usual answer is a shape — home, about, services, gallery, contact — which is what brochures looked like and has nothing to do with what anybody arrives wanting. A website is not a brochure. It is an index of answers, and every one of the questions belongs to somebody else: how much, how soon, do you come out here, have you done one like mine, who turns up, and can I get hold of you. Decide the pages from those and the writing gets much easier, because you stop trying to describe yourself and start answering people.
This is the single decision that makes the difference, and almost nobody makes it. Write down the jobs you would take ten more of this year. Each one gets a page of its own, under the name a customer would use for it, and that page is allowed to be about nothing else. Everything else on the list below exists to answer a question those pages leave open — what it costs, where you go, whether you have done one like this, who turns up, how to reach you. The people who do this find out something uncomfortable and useful: a site with four honest service pages beats a site with twenty-four pages of personality.
Not a list of twelve things under one Services heading. One page per job, titled in the words somebody would actually type, saying what the job involves, what decides the price, how long it takes and what happens next. If you would take more of a particular kind of work, that work has earned a page. If you would not, leave it off and stop competing for it.
Most people will not ring until they have some idea of the number, and most sites refuse to give one. You do not have to publish a price list. A callout fee, an hourly rate, a typical range for the three most common jobs, or a plain sentence saying what moves the number — any of those is worth more than "contact us for a quote", which reads as a conversation you have to earn.
Name the areas rather than saying you cover the region. Say where you will not drive, and say what the travel charge is if there is one. Half the value of this page is the enquiries it stops before your phone rings, and the areas worth a page of their own are a separate question — the Auckland page below is about how to pick them.
Photographs off your own phone, of jobs you have done, with a line each saying where it was and what it involved. Not a grid of forty untitled images. Six jobs described properly do more than sixty in a lightbox, and nobody needs the ones that look like they came from a photo library, because people can tell.
How long you have been doing it, what you are registered and insured for, who actually turns up, and whether it is you on the phone. That is the page. It is read by about one person in ten and it is read hard by the ones who read it, usually just before they ring, so it should answer the awkward questions rather than describe your values.
A contact page is fine and it is not where anybody contacts you from. The number, the form and the hours belong on every page, near where the person finishes reading. The one thing the page itself should carry that nothing else does is what happens after you get in touch: who replies, how fast, and what they will need to know.
These are the pages that bring strangers in. Somebody with a problem types the problem, not your trade. A page that answers one of those questions properly, in plain words, gets found by people who are not yet looking for anybody by name — and it is also the page they send to whoever is paying. This site is mostly built of them, including the one you are reading.
Every brochure site in the country has one and no visitor has ever gone looking for it. It is usually the first thing written, because it is the only part of a website that feels like writing, and it sits in the place where the one question somebody arrived with should have been answered. It does not need rewriting. It needs deleting, and section 04 is the rest of that list.
Write down the jobs you would take ten more of. Beside each one, write the words a customer would use for it — not your words, theirs. That list is your service pages, in order, and the longest one is usually the one with no page today.
For most local businesses, somewhere between six and twelve. Four pages is a real site if the four are the right four. Twenty-four is almost always one site plus a lot of writing that was easier to produce than the four.
If you cannot say in one sentence which question a page answers and who is asking it, that is not a writing problem. The page has no job, and no amount of better copy gives it one.
The same list. A website that was built from the jobs you want can grow by adding a job rather than by being redesigned, which is why this decision outlives the site it was made for.
That is the shape, and the order matters more than the count: the service pages are the site and the rest answers what they leave open. It is also the same list a Google Business Profile wants, service by service, which is why the $395 setup starts with it — the work carries over either way. Section 02 is what goes on each one.
Open your own site on your phone and check these eight, one page at a time. They are not a style guide and none of them is a matter of taste — each one is a question somebody arrives with, and a page missing it sends that person back to the search results to try the next number. This is the part of the job you can do yourself tonight for nothing, and on most sites it is worth more than a redesign.
At the top, before anything else, in plain words. "Hot water repairs across the North Shore, same day where we can" tells somebody in ten words whether they are in the right place. A heading that says "Quality you can trust" tells them nothing and costs you the two seconds they were prepared to give you. If the sentence could sit on any business in your trade, it is not doing the job.
The number, a range, the callout fee, or what moves it. People are checking whether you are in their world before they invest a phone call, and a site with no number anywhere reads as expensive by default. If you genuinely cannot price the work without seeing it, say that in a sentence and say what the visit costs — that is a price signal too.
Tappable, on every page, and not only in the header. Most of the people reading you are on a phone with one hand, and the moment they decide is wherever they happened to be on the page. A number that has to be found, or copied out of an image, is a number that does not get rung.
Ring, or fill this in. Not ring, or fill this in, or email, or message us on two platforms, or book a consultation. Every extra option is another decision handed to somebody who only wanted their problem dealt with. Put the step where the reading finishes, say what happens after it, and stop.
A photograph of your own work, your registration number, the suburb you are based in, the name of the person who turns up. Proof is not a testimonials page; it is the accumulation of details a stranger could check. The site that says nothing specific is the site that reads as a franchise with no address.
You already know what they are. Do you charge for a quote, how soon can you come, do you work weekends, do you take card, is there a minimum. Written down once, they stop being a conversation you have forty times a year and start being the reason somebody rings you instead of the next number.
On the site and on the Google profile, saying the same thing. This is the detail most often wrong and the cheapest to fix — and people take "closed" at its word rather than ringing to check. If you will answer at nine at night, that belongs on there. If you will not, saying so plainly is better than a call you never return.
One short paragraph under the form saying what the details are used for, who else handles them, and that they are not being sold or added to a list. It is required in substance by the Privacy Act at the point you collect them, and it is also the sentence that makes a stranger willing to put a mobile number into a box. There is one under the form at the foot of this page.
Eight checks, a page at a time, and you need nobody's help with any of them. If you do only one, do the first — the sentence at the top of each page. Section 03 is whose words all of this is written in, which is the part that decides whether anybody ever reaches the page at all.
This is the whole of what people mean by search, stripped of the jargon. Somebody with a problem describes the problem. Somebody in a trade describes the solution, because that is the part they do. Those are different sets of words, and a site written entirely in the second set is invisible to everybody using the first. It is also harder to read, which is the part nobody mentions.
A person standing in a cold shower does not type the name of a component. They type what is happening to them, in the words they would use on the phone to a mate, usually with a place name on the end. The site that gets found is the one that has those words on it — not sprinkled through it, but used as the heading of a page, because that is how somebody arrives at the answer rather than at a business.
The way to find them costs nothing and takes an evening. Go through your last twenty jobs and write down how each customer described the problem when they rang. Not what it turned out to be — what they said first. That list is the vocabulary your website should be written in, and it will not look much like the list of services on your van.
Then type three of those descriptions into your phone, with your suburb on the end, and look at what comes back. You are not looking at your own position, which is unreliable from your own kitchen and tells you very little. You are looking at who is answering the question, and in what words. Most of the time it is not a local business at all — it is a national site, a directory, or the search result answering it directly.
Two cautions, because this is where people are sold things. Repeating a phrase on a page does not help and has been grounds for trouble for years; what helps is a page that genuinely answers the thing. And nobody can tell you what position you will end up in. Anybody who does is guessing with your money, and that includes us — there is no promise of a ranking anywhere on this site and there is not going to be one.
How your last twenty customers described the problem when they rang, in their words. It is the single most useful document in this whole exercise and it exists nowhere except in your head.
One page per question, answered properly. Ten thin pages built around the same phrase with the suburb swapped are worth less than none — search engines have discounted that for years, and a customer who lands on one can tell.
Type three of your customers' own descriptions into a phone. Whoever is answering the question is who you are competing with, and it is usually not the business you thought.
A position. Nobody can sell you one and we are not going to. What is within anybody's control is being the page that answers the question — that part is work rather than luck.
That is the method, and the last three sections of this page are all downstream of it. If your site is already live and quiet, the words are only one of five places it can be going wrong, and there are five checks you can run tonight to find which.
Most of what makes a small business website hard to read was not a mistake. It was the easiest thing to write. Describing yourself is comfortable, answering somebody else's question is work, and a page fills up with the comfortable part while the question goes unanswered. Every item below can go today, by you, for nothing, and the page underneath is almost always better than the one that had it.
It occupies the one piece of screen where the question somebody arrived with should be answered, and it says nothing. The visitor already knows where they are; they tapped a link to get here.
Put there instead: the one sentence from section 02 — what this page is about and who it is for.
Nobody rings a tradesman because of his values, and every business in your trade claims the same three. It is not that it is untrue — it is that it is unfalsifiable, so it carries no information.
Put there instead: something checkable. A registration number, how long you have been going, the suburb you work out of.
Three claims in one sentence, none of which can be false and all of which appear on your competitors' sites word for word. A reader comparing three quotes learns nothing from it, and he knows he has learnt nothing.
Put there instead: one specific thing. What you will not do, who you will not drive to, or what the callout actually costs.
People recognise these, and the recognition does more damage than an empty space would. A site with no photographs reads as new; a site with bought ones reads as a business pretending to be bigger than it is.
Put there instead: one photograph off your own phone of a job you did, with a line saying where it was.
A price list, a menu or a service sheet as a download is slow, unreadable on a phone without pinching, and close to invisible to search. The thing people most wanted is the thing hardest to get at.
Put there instead: the same content as text on a page. Keep the PDF as well if somebody needs to print it.
One page carrying every job you do competes for none of them and answers nobody properly. It is also the page an owner is proudest of, because it took the longest to write.
Put there instead: a page for each job you want more of, per section 01. Keep the list as a contents page if it helps.
It reads badly to a person and has been grounds for trouble with search engines for a decade. Somebody was probably paid for it, which is the part worth being annoyed about.
Put there instead: the phrase once, in the heading, and then write the page for the person reading it.
Four messages rotating through one space means three of them are not on the screen when somebody decides, and the first one is gone before it was read. It is a way of avoiding choosing.
Put there instead: the one thing you would say if you only got one. That is the decision the slideshow was postponing.
Go through the site page by page and name, out loud, the person each page is for and the question they arrived with. The pages where that is hard are the pages carrying the writing that was easiest to produce.
Put there instead: nothing. A shorter site that answers people is a better site, and deleting is the only free improvement on this page.
Nine things, all of them free, and between them they take an evening. None of it needs a studio and none of it needs us — which is the point of writing it down, because it is the only part of this subject anybody can check us on. Section 05 is the part that has changed, and it changes what is worth writing at all.
That figure is SparkToro and Similarweb's, measured between January and April 2026, and it is the most useful thing on this page for deciding what to write. The hours, the phone number, the address and the photographs are being read straight off the search result. The question "are you open" is answered before anybody reaches you. So writing more of what a search result can answer for itself is work with nowhere to land — and the pages that still matter are the ones where the answer is yours and nobody else has it.
Start with the consequence that saves money: for a lot of local businesses the Google profile is now doing more of the selling than the website is, and it is the half most likely to be wrong. That is why the $395 setup is the first thing we would do for anybody, website or not. It is also why a café is the one trade this studio will tell outright to fix the profile and leave the website for later.
Then the pages that survive. Your prices, or whatever you are willing to say about them. Where you will and will not drive. Whether you can come this week. What you are registered for. Photographs of your own work. The three questions you answer on the phone every week. Nobody can answer any of those for you, which is exactly why they are worth writing and why they are the six things most of these sites leave out.
And the pages that bring strangers in — the ones built around a question somebody types before they are ready to buy. Those are harder to write than a services page and they are the only writing on a small business site that works while nobody is at the desk. This page is one of them. Its job is to be the answer, and if somebody reads it, works through sections 02, 03 and 04 himself and never gets in touch, it has still done something.
Where the machines come into it, plainly, because this is a page about writing and we build with AI and say so. The draft of anything we write is machine-assisted. Every line is read by a person before it goes up, because the failure a language model makes on a trade website is not a typo — it is a confident sentence about your work that nobody checked. Anything that is a claim about your business, your qualifications or your prices goes back to you to sign off, because you are the one the Fair Trading Act and your own trade's rules apply to, not us.
Writing that repeats what a search result already shows: hours, address, phone number, the general description of a trade anybody could write.
Anything only you can say. Prices, the boundary of where you go, availability, your own photographs, your registrations, and the questions you answer on the phone every week.
The Google profile, for most local businesses, because it is what the result is assembled from and most of them have never had it set up properly.
That any of this puts you anywhere in particular. It does not, nobody can say otherwise with a straight face, and this page is not going to.
So the brief gets simpler rather than harder: fix the profile, then write the pages nobody can write for you. The $395 setup is nine things in a day, and it is the same list of services your website would be built around, so the work carries over either way.
Put these to whoever is about to charge you for content, copywriting or search work, and to us. Every one is answerable in a sentence by somebody doing the job properly, and the useful part is not any single answer — it is that nobody selling a package with nothing behind it gets through all seven without going away to check. Keep it friendly. Most of them come back the same afternoon.
Ask to see the list before any writing starts, and ask what decided it. If the answer is the jobs you said you wanted more of, that is the right answer. If it is a page count in a package, you are buying words by the kilo and the pages will be whatever fits the number.
The only honest sources are your customers and you — how people describe the problem when they ring, and how you talk about the job. Ask whether anybody is going to listen to a call, read your enquiries, or sit with you for half an hour. If nothing like that is in the quote, the words will be the trade's rather than the customer's.
Ask it plainly. A machine draft is not the problem and is now close to universal; the problem is nobody reading it. The failure is a confident sentence about your work that is not true, published under your name, on a page you are legally responsible for. The answer you want is yes, machine-assisted, and yes, read line by line, and yes, you sign off anything that is a claim.
You should, in writing, every time. Nobody writing for you can know what you are registered for, what you will guarantee or what a job really involves — and you are the one the Fair Trading Act applies to. Anybody willing to publish claims about your work without your sign-off is a risk you are paying for.
Enquiries and calls, or impressions and positions? The first are the business and the second are weather. Ask what the number was before they started, because a report with no starting point can only ever be good news. Ask to see a sample report before you sign anything.
The best question on the list, and the fastest. Anybody honest has a short clear answer: not a position, not a number of enquiries, not a date for either. Anybody who cannot name a single thing they will not promise has just told you everything they say is unfalsifiable.
The one people forget until it matters. Written content you have paid for should be yours and should stay on your site whatever happens to the arrangement. Ask whether that is true, and ask whose name the site and the domain are in while you are at it — the five accounts are set out here, and it is the question to ask of any studio, this one included.
Ask question 1 and question 6. The list of pages and where it came from, and the thing they will not promise. Those two separate almost everybody.
Short, specific, and willing to say no. "Here is the list, it came from your own jobs, and we will not promise you a position."
A number of pages, a number of words, a number of keywords, and a word like guaranteed attached to anything that happens outside your own business.
Section 07 answers them in order, and if an answer there is not good enough, say so on the phone. The number is at the foot of this page.
The page list comes from the jobs you tell us you want more of, and you see it and change it before a word is written. The words come from your last twenty enquiries and half an hour on the phone with you, because there is nowhere else honest to get them. Yes, the draft is machine-assisted, and yes, every line is read by a person before it goes anywhere near your site. Anything that is a claim about your business comes back to you to sign off, in writing, every time. What we report is enquiries and calls, monthly, in one page of plain English, with the figure from before we started at the top — ask and we will show you one. What we will not promise is a position, a number of enquiries, or a date for either, and that is written into the homepage as well. And if you stop paying, every page stays on your site, which is yours already, with the domain and the logins in your name from the first day.
Sections 02, 03 and 04 are the whole method and nothing in them is withheld. The eight checks, the twenty-job vocabulary list, the nine things to delete. For a business with a few pages that rarely change, this is the right answer more often than anybody selling content will tell you, and we will say so when it is. Nothing to pay, nothing to cancel, and no follow-up in the spring.
Writing that answers what people are actually searching for, a page at a time, in the order the jobs matter to you. Google profile posts and photographs kept going, replies to reviews, and the hours and prices kept in step with the business. One page of plain English a month saying what was written, what it did, and whether it was a good month. No term, no lock-in.
First on the list for most local businesses, because section 05 is why. Claimed, verified, in your name, with the categories, service areas, hours, photographs, description and review link done properly, and a routine you can work from the van. The services list it is built from is the same one your website would be built around, so nothing is done twice.
Three tiers, four pages up to a page per service and suburb. The writing is part of the build rather than something added afterwards, and the first thing built is your real homepage, before any money moves — so what you are judging is the site rather than a description of one. The monthly content is optional on every tier and saying no to it changes nothing about what you own.
Every figure on this page includes GST and nothing is added at the end. There is no term on the monthly work, no exit fee and no notice period, and the pages stay yours either way. The founding price takes $500 off any website, for the first ten clients, in exchange for three things written into the job: an honest Google review, a testimonial we can use, and permission to publish the build as a case study. It is a trade rather than a discount, and we do not discount off-menu. Full pricing, tier by tier, and how to read anybody's quote.
You sell writing by the month and most of this page tells me to do it myself. It does, and here is the arithmetic rather than a virtue. Content sold to somebody who could have written it himself gets cancelled in the autumn, and in the meantime it produces a customer who tells people the money was wasted. Content taken by somebody who genuinely has no evening to give it gets kept for years. The second kind is the entire business, and the only way to find those people is to describe the first kind out loud.
So is the free method real, or is it a way of getting the phone to ring? Partly the second, plainly — a person searching for what to put on a website has a business and a budget. It is also real: sections 02, 03 and 04 are the whole routine, nothing in them is held back for a paying version, and if you work through them and never ring us we have lost nothing we had. Writing down the part you can do yourself is the only part of this subject anybody can check us on.
You use AI to write and you are telling me to be careful about AI writing. Both, and they are not in conflict. The thing worth being careful about is not a machine making the first draft — it is nobody reading it afterwards, and a sentence about somebody's trade going up unchecked. So the disclosure is on the homepage, in the questions and here: machine-assisted draft, every line read by a person, and you sign off anything that is a claim about your own work. If you would rather every word were typed by hand, say so and we will tell you what that costs instead of pretending it is what you are already getting.
And the part we cannot dress up. Skyward is new and has no clients yet, so nothing on this page is a story about a site whose enquiries we tripled. There are no testimonials here because there are none to print, and the builds in the portfolio are invented businesses, labelled as such on every page of them. What is written above is how the work is done and what it costs, not a count of how many times we have done it. The first ten clients get $500 off for helping with the not-having-any problem, in exchange for a review, a testimonial and permission to publish the build.
As many as there are jobs you want more of, plus the handful in section 01 that answer what those pages leave open. For most local businesses that lands somewhere between six and twelve. Four is a real site if the four are the right four, and twenty-four is usually one site plus a lot of writing that was easier to produce than the four.
The number is the wrong thing to decide first, which is why packages quoted by page count tend to produce sites with the wrong pages in them. Decide the jobs, and the number falls out.
No, and almost everybody is better off putting something. A callout fee, an hourly rate, a typical range for your three most common jobs, or one sentence saying what moves the number. People are working out whether you are in their world before they spend a phone call, and a site with no figure anywhere reads as expensive by default.
If the work genuinely cannot be priced without seeing it, say that plainly and say what the visit costs. That is still a price signal, and it is a great deal better than asking somebody to ring you to find out whether they can afford you.
Yes, and you have one advantage nobody you hire can buy: you know how customers describe the problem, because you answer the phone. The twenty-job list in section 03 is something only you can produce. Write badly and specifically rather than well and vaguely — a page that says what a job involves and what it costs beats a polished page that says you are passionate.
Where people come unstuck is not the writing, it is finishing it. If the site has been three pages short since March, that is usually the honest reason to hand it over rather than any shortage of ability.
For a first draft, it is already how most of this gets done, including here, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What matters is what happens next. Read every line. Delete the sentences that could be about any business in your trade, because that is what these drafts produce most reliably. And never let a claim about your own work go up unchecked — your registrations, your guarantees, your prices and your lead times are yours to confirm and yours to answer for.
The specific risk on a trade site is a confident, wrong, plausible sentence. It does not look like an error. It looks like good copy, which is exactly why somebody has to read it who knows the job.
Long enough to answer the question and not a word past it. The useful test is not word count — it is whether a stranger could get what they came for without scrolling past anything written to make you feel professional. Some pages are two hundred words. This one is not, because the question it answers is bigger.
If you are stuck, write the three questions that page has to answer, answer each one in a paragraph, and stop. That is a page.
For some businesses, yes — if the work is one thing, in one area, and the phone is how people buy. A single page that answers what you do, where, roughly what it costs and how to reach you is a perfectly respectable website and better than most five-page ones.
It stops being enough when you want to be found for more than one kind of job, because one page can only really be about one thing. That is the moment the list in section 01 is worth making. Whether you need a site at all is a separate question and there is a page for it.
One if the site is already live and quiet, one if section 05 convinced you the profile matters more than the pages, and one if you are still deciding whether to have a website at all.
The words are one of five places this goes wrong, and usually not the first. Five checks you can run tonight on your own phone to find which stage is losing people, and the four things you will be told it is that it usually is not.
What the day involves, field by field, in the order it is done — and the one thing it does not buy, which is a ranking, because nobody can sell you one. No website needed and yours either way.
Whether that is costing you anything depends on where your work actually comes from, and there is a way to find out before you spend. Including the cases where the answer is no.
No charge and no obligation. Send the kinds of work you would take ten more of this year and your website address if you have one, and you will get back the page list those jobs imply, which of them your site already has, and the words your customers are likely using for them. If the honest answer is that you should write it yourself from sections 02 to 04, that is what you will be told — it costs us an hour and it is how we find the people who genuinely want it handed over.
Josh reads these himself. There is no salesperson, no sequence of emails afterwards, and asking what to put on your website does not put you on a list.
That's with Josh now, and he'll come back with the page list those jobs imply — within a working day, usually the same morning.
Nothing is committed and there's nothing to pay for the list. If the honest answer is that you should write it yourself, that's what you'll be told. And if you would rather just talk it through, ring 022 584 0585.