Why Every Word on Your Website Is Probably in the Wrong Place
Most firms approach a website project the same way: gather the team, open a Google Doc, and start writing. What do we want to say about ourselves? What services should we list? What should the About page include?
It feels productive. There is activity. Pages fill up. Someone gets feedback and revises. The process looks like progress. But by the time the site launches, the copy almost always has a hollow quality — technically accurate, professionally formatted, and somehow not quite landing.
The reason is not that the writing is bad. The reason is that it was written before the most important decisions were made. Copy is the output of positioning — and most firms try to write the output before they have done the upstream work.
Copy Is the Output, Not the Input
Before a single word of copy should be written, four things need to be settled: who you are specifically for, what specific problem you solve for them, how your approach is different from the alternatives, and what the result of working with you looks like.
These are positioning decisions. They are not creative decisions. They are strategic decisions about where the firm competes, who it serves, and what it promises. They require honest conversation about what the firm actually delivers versus what it aspires to deliver. They often require some difficult choices about who to stop serving in order to serve the right clients better.
Once those decisions are made, copy becomes almost mechanical. You know who you are talking to. You know what they care about. You know what makes your approach different and valuable. The words follow naturally from that foundation. Without it, you are writing in a vacuum — and it shows.
"Most firms write copy and then try to figure out what they want to say. That is backwards — and it explains why the words never quite land."
What Has to Come Before the Words
Positioning comes first. Not a tagline — a strategic decision about where in the market you compete and for whom. This means being honest about the segment of clients where you win consistently, the type of engagement where your work is distinctly better than the alternatives, and the promise you can make and keep.
Messaging architecture comes second. This is the hierarchy of ideas — the core message, the supporting proof points, the objection-handling statements, the language that resonates with your specific target client. This is where the voice and tone decisions live. It is not creative writing. It is strategic writing.
Site structure comes third. Where does each message live? What page does what job? What is the sequence of ideas a visitor encounters as they move through the site? The information architecture should flow from the messaging, not from convention or from what your previous site looked like.
Only then does copy get written. At that stage, it is fast. It is clear. It sounds like a firm that knows exactly who it is and who it is for. That clarity comes from the upstream work — not from editing the same draft twelve times.
How to Know Your Copy Is Ready to Write
There is a simple test. Before writing a single word of homepage copy, answer these questions in one sentence each: Who is this site specifically for? What is the exact problem they have that we solve? What do they get from working with us that they cannot easily get elsewhere? What does it look like to work with us versus the alternatives?
If those sentences are clear, specific, and differentiated — not vague, not generic, not something every competitor could also claim — you are ready to write copy. If they are fuzzy, the copy will be fuzzy, no matter how skilled the writer.
The firms that get this right spend more time on strategy before the writing starts and less time revising after. They also end up with websites that consistently attract the right clients — because the clarity was there from the beginning, and good copy simply made it legible to the outside world.
