How to Write Website Copy People Actually Read

Website copywriting is the writing of the words a customer reads before they decide to call you: the headline, the first screen, the service pages, the prices and the proof. Most of those words never get read. Visitors have time for about a fifth of them, and in Australia a large share are reading on a phone. So the job is not to write more. It is to put the right fifty words where the eye lands first, and to make every line after them earn its place.

I write the copy on every website I build, and the mistake I fix most often is not bad writing. It is a page that is about the business when it should be about the customer's problem, with the useful sentence buried in paragraph four. This article is how I write a page, in the order I do it, with a real before and after and what Google actually says about using AI to write it.

What Is Copywriting for a Website?

It is not blog writing and it is not advertising. A blog post informs someone who came to learn. An ad interrupts someone who was doing something else. Website copy meets someone who already has a problem, typed it into Google, and landed on your page wanting one thing: to know, fast, whether you are the answer. The copy's job is to say yes or no in the first screen, prove it in the second, and make the next step obvious.

That order matters because of how little gets read. In 2008 the Nielsen Norman Group analysed 45,237 page views from 25 people going about their ordinary browsing and concluded that on an average page "users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely." The study is old and the behaviour has not improved. On a 600-word homepage, 20% is about 120 words. Whatever you need the visitor to know has to be inside those 120, and most of those are at the top.

The First Screen Carries the Page

In Australia, Statcounter put mobile at 48.57% of web use in September 2026, against 48.48% desktop. On a phone the first screen holds a headline, one line under it and a button, roughly 40 to 60 words before anyone scrolls. That is the whole first impression for four visitors in ten. Here is what it has to carry.

The line most businesses leave out is the third one. If your price cannot be a number, it can be a from price or a range, and a page that says "from $2,900" is read differently from a page that says "contact us for a quote", because the first one answers the question and the second one asks the visitor to do work. My own pages carry prices for that reason, and it is also why the copy on a service page and the search work on it are the same job: the words a customer types into Google, "how much does a website cost", are the words the page should answer in its first screen.

Page by Page, What to Say

Every page has one question it exists to answer. Write the answer first, then the rest.

The About page is the one most owners write last and worst, and it is the one an AI assistant reads to decide who you are. My guide to getting your business recommended by AI covers why plain, specific, answer-first copy is what those tools quote. And if you have traffic landing on these pages and leaving, website traffic but no sales works through the five leaks, and weak copy is two of them.

One Sentence, Before and After

This is the sentence I see at the top of more tradie websites than any other, or a close cousin of it:

Before: "We are a family owned and operated business committed to providing quality workmanship and exceptional customer service to all our valued clients."

Twenty-three words, and not one of them tells the visitor what you do, where, or what it costs. Every competitor could paste it onto their own site. Here is the rewrite for a plumber.

After: "Blocked drain in Port Macquarie? I'm usually there within two hours, and the call-out fee is on this page."

Nineteen words. What, where, how fast, and a promise about price the visitor can check by scrolling. It uses "I" because it is one person, and the customer wants to know who is turning up. If you are a team of six, say "we" and mean it. The test for every sentence on the site is the same: would you say it across the counter to a customer? Nobody has ever said "exceptional customer service to all our valued clients" out loud to a human being.

A client who runs a conference for both practitioners and families taught me the other half of this. My first drafts of her copy said "plain language" and "no clinical background needed" to reassure the parents. She struck every one of them out. Most of those parents are highly informed about the condition that concerns their own family, and the phrase read as talking down to them. Plain copy does not mean simple copy. It means copy that respects how much the reader already knows and gets to the point.

What Google Says About AI Copy

The honest position, because three of the seven pages ranking for this topic either ban AI outright or sell you a prompt. Google's guidance on creating helpful content, last updated 10 December 2025, says: "If you use automation, including AI-generation, to produce content for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings, that's a violation of our spam policies." The spam policies themselves, updated 28 August 2026, name "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users" as scaled content abuse.

Read those carefully. Neither bans AI. Both ban producing volume for its own sake. The same helpful-content page says that of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, "trust is most important", and that sharing how content was produced helps readers understand the role automation played. So the rule I work to is simple. AI can help you past a blank page. It cannot know your from price, your suburb, your licence number, the review that mentions you by name or the thing customers say on the phone before they book. Every one of those is what makes your page different from the one AI would write for your competitor, and every one has to be typed in by you. A page where the only specific thing is the business name is a page nobody, human or machine, has a reason to prefer.

What Good Copy Costs, and What Bad Copy Costs

The pages I read quote freelance copywriters at roughly $90 to $160 an hour and a small-business site at $1,000 to $4,000 in September 2026, none of it sourced, so treat it as the market talking about itself. On my builds the copy is not a separate invoice. Every page is $600, four-page minimum, and each ships with its keyword research, the copy, its schema and its own share image, delivered in three to four weeks. I price it that way because copy written separately from the page's search job comes back needing a rewrite.

The number nobody quotes is the other one. A page that gets 200 visitors a month and turns one of them into an enquiry is running at 0.5%. If a rewrite of the first screen takes that to two enquiries, the copy has doubled the page without a single extra visitor. That is the cheapest growth on any website, and it is why I would fix the words before I would spend a dollar sending more people to read the old ones.

If you want to know which of your pages is losing people at the first screen, The Found Report reads your homepage and the pages that sell the way a customer reads them and scores the lot out of 100, $550 flat. And why web design is important covers the other half of a first impression, which is what the words sit inside.

Frequently Asked Questions

Hayley Rasmussen

Founder & digital marketing specialist at Saltline Studio, Port Macquarie. Helping small businesses grow with custom websites and organic search.