Website copy in the trades: what the business supplies

An agency can build a page structure without knowing the business: write headings, plan routes through the site, set up forms, pick the five photos out of twenty that carry weight. What cannot be researched is the work itself. Whether you take on period properties or deliberately do not. Whether you drive as far as the next city or stop at thirty kilometres. Whether a quote follows one week or four weeks after the site visit. Whether you take the rubble away or the customer orders the skip. None of this appears in a directory, a brochure or on the site of a comparable business. It exists only in the heads of the people who load the van in the morning — which is why every website project stalls at exactly this point.

What happens when it is missing can be seen on a great many trade websites: what gets written is whatever fits everywhere. Quality from master craftsmen, reliable and punctual, your strong partner for bathrooms. Such sentences are not wrong, they are empty — they are equally true of the business in the next village. Anyone with three sites open side by side finds nothing there to base a decision on and ends up calling whoever answers first. The text has not done any work, it has filled space. How a trade website is structured so that these details land in the right place is a separate question; without content from the business, even the best structure stays a shell. You will find the outline of that structure on our services page.

Customer expectations do not make it easier. 89 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses report that customers expect individual offers, and 74 percent (Bitkom 2025) find that customers have become more critical; both figures come from a survey of 504 trade companies. Anyone reading critically and expecting something individual spots interchangeable copy within seconds. Add the sheer number of businesses: 1,038,126 (ZDH 2025) are entered in the German trade registers and the register of trade-like occupations. What sets a business apart in that crowd is not the existence of a site but details that are true of it alone.

The usual sequence goes like this: at the kick-off it is agreed that the business will supply the copy. Then nothing happens for eight weeks. Not out of reluctance, but because the task grows in the mind to the size of a tax return: writing copy sounds like a blank page, like phrasing, like spelling, like something you do not start after ten hours on site. The answer is not more discipline but a smaller job. Not write copy, but answer six questions — out loud, in full sentences, the way you would explain them to a new employee on their first day.

Do not sit down at a desk for it. The details come out most reliably where the work happens: in the van on the way back, in the workshop, in the office on a Friday afternoon, ideally with the person who takes most of the calls. Half an hour, phone set to record, questions one after another. As a rule all the blocks are covered after a short time (project experience), because you are not inventing anything — you are only saying out loud what you explain every day anyway.

There is a single test, and it works on any paragraph: cover the company name and read it again. Could the same paragraph stand unchanged on another business's site? Then it is filler. The test takes two minutes per page, needs no expertise, and finds missing substance more reliably than any meeting. It also works on your existing site, long before anyone starts talking about a relaunch.

Three features almost always appear together. First, qualities are listed instead of actions described: reliable, competent, punctual. Second, everything revolves around the business rather than the customer's situation — we offer, we stand for, we set great store by. Third, there is not a single figure, place name or limit; nothing in the text could be checked. As soon as one of the three is noticeable, the other two are usually there as well.

The difference in the right-hand column is not style but information. Each of those details answers a question that would otherwise be asked on the phone, and each of them can turn out not to fit — which is exactly where its value lies. A text nobody can disagree with helps nobody decide. As a by-product the right-hand column supplies what local visibility runs on: place names, service designations and the wording people actually search for.

These three blocks are missing most often, although they are the easiest to supply. The service area appears in no legal notice, yet it follows from any log of journeys: give the radius in kilometres and the towns where work actually took place last year. A town you have never worked in does not belong on the list, however large it is — otherwise you generate enquiries you will only turn down again. For businesses covering several districts, a short rule about exceptions beats a long list of place names.

The job sequence is the block that turns enquiries into orders, because it removes uncertainty. Most private customers commission a trade rarely and simply do not know what is coming: whether they need to be at home, who orders the materials, when payment is due, who clears up. Five steps with realistic timings are enough. Equipment, meanwhile, tends to arrive as an inventory although only the part that reaches the customer counts: own scaffolding instead of waiting for hired gear, own workshop instead of delivery times, measuring equipment in the van instead of a second visit. How to combine that with pictures from your own yard is covered in our services overview.

The idea that the business has to deliver finished copy is the most common reason why website projects in the trades take six months instead of six weeks. It is also wrong on the merits. The business supplies content, the agency supplies form. What comes of it takes two rounds: the recording becomes a draft, the draft goes back to the business, is corrected for technical accuracy, and then the text is done. Two rounds, not seven.

This division belongs in the quote, not in a passing remark. If a contract says the client provides the copy, that is a commitment most businesses cannot keep — and the project ends in mutual waiting. What we agree instead is half an hour of recording and half an hour of proofreading per page from the business, and everything else from us. What that means for the fixed price is settled beforehand, not afterwards; you can raise it with us via contact.

The first benefit is time, and it arrives immediately. Questions answered on the site are asked less often on the phone; enquiries that never fitted arrive less often at all. The second benefit shows later: search engines and answer systems can only repeat what is written down somewhere. A business whose service limits, towns and processes appear nowhere simply does not turn up in answers to specific questions, even if it could do the work.

The third benefit is regularly underestimated and concerns staff. Filling a vacancy calls for the same details in a different order: what kind of work comes up, how the business is organised, how far people travel, who decides what. The material from the recording carries both the service pages and the careers page. There is no need to collect it twice.