Writing your own website content with AI without sounding like everyone else
Most small businesses now use an AI tool somewhere in their writing, and most of the results read like every other page in the same trade. That is a real problem, because the whole point of a website page is to be chosen over the others.
What these tools are good at
Structure, first drafts and getting unstuck. Ask for the questions a customer asks before buying a particular service and you will get a decent list, which is a useful outline. Ask it to tidy up something you have already written and it will. Ask it to tell you what a page is missing and it is often right.
What they are bad at
Knowing anything about you. It does not know what you charge, which streets you cover, what went wrong on the job last March or why you do one thing differently from the shop down the road. Those are exactly the things that make a page worth reading and worth ranking, so they have to come from you.
A way of working that produces something worth publishing
- Decide the one thing the page is for before you open anything. One service, one place, one question.
- Get an outline, not prose. Ask for the questions a customer would want answered, then choose which to answer.
- Answer the first question in the first two lines. People and search engines both reward a page that gets to the point.
- Replace every general sentence with a specific one. Swap "competitive prices" for the actual price. Swap "fast turnaround" for how long it actually takes. Swap "we serve the local area" for the towns.
- Add what only you have: photographs of your own work, a real example, what you would advise someone not to do.
- Read it aloud. Anything you would not say to a customer standing in front of you, cut.
- Check every fact. These tools state wrong things confidently, including prices, measurements and rules. Verify anything a reader could act on.
Two things to be careful about
Do not publish the same text on several pages with the town name swapped. It reads badly and it does not work. And do not give a tool anything you would not want repeated: customer names, quotes you have given, anything covered by a contract.
The same rule applies to print
Whatever you publish online should say the same things as what you hand people: the same prices, the same phone number, the same promises. If you are refreshing your website copy, it is a good moment to look at whether your business stationery and flyers still say the same thing, because customers do cross check. A price printed on an A5 flat leaflet last spring is still the price someone will hold you to this week.
