Copywriting is writing intended to get someone to do something. On the web it competes with a back button that is always one click away, which changes how it has to be written.
The most common weakness in business writing is that it describes the business rather than the reader's situation.
| Business-focused | Reader-focused |
|---|---|
| We are a leading provider of IT solutions | Your laptop, fixed in 48 hours |
| Our team has 20 years of combined experience | We have seen this problem before, and we know what causes it |
| We offer a comprehensive range of services | Tell us what stopped working and we will tell you what it costs |
Experience and credentials still matter — but they land far better as evidence supporting a claim the reader cares about than as an opening statement about yourself.
A feature is what something is. A benefit is what it does for the person. Both belong on a page, but the benefit has to come first, because it is what makes the feature worth reading about.
Vague claims are invisible because every competitor makes the same ones. "High quality", "affordable", "professional", "reliable" — these words appear on every business website and therefore distinguish none of them.
Specificity is what makes a claim believable: not "fast service" but "most repairs done same day"; not "affordable courses" but the actual price; not "experienced trainers" but what they have actually built.
The competitor test
A useful test: could a competitor put this exact sentence on their site without changing anything? If yes, it is not saying anything. Rewrite it until only you could have written it.
People scan web pages before deciding whether to read them. Copy has to survive that first pass:
Industry vocabulary excludes exactly the people who most need explaining to. If a term is necessary, define it the first time. If it is not necessary, remove it.
This is not about writing simplistically — it is about not making a reader work to decode a sentence when a clearer one was available. Complexity in the subject is fine; complexity in the sentence is a choice.
First drafts are always longer than they need to be. The most reliable improvement available to any piece of writing is cutting it: remove qualifiers, delete sentences that restate the previous one, and take out anything the reader already assumed.