Take the About page of ten businesses in the same trade, remove the names, and try to work out which is which.
You will not manage it. They all deliver quality solutions, they are all passionate about their customers, and they all combine experience with innovation.
This is not a writing skill problem. Everybody involved can write. It is a decision problem, and it happens in a predictable way.
Why does everyone end up sounding the same?
Because generic writing is what you get when nobody is willing to be specific.
Specific claims can be checked, disagreed with, and held against you. “Trusted by businesses across the region” is safe. “Forty three clients, the longest with us since 2018” is not safe, because someone might ask, and someone might have left.
So the safe version goes on the website, and the safe version is identical to everyone else’s safe version, which means it does no work at all.
The second cause is copying. When people are unsure how to write about their business, they look at competitors, absorb the register, and reproduce it. Do that across an industry for ten years and every website converges.
What is the fastest fix?
Replace every adjective you can with a fact.
Go through your website and highlight every evaluative word. Leading, premium, trusted, innovative, bespoke, world class, passionate. For each one, ask what made you write it, and put that in instead.
Leading becomes a number of clients or years. Premium becomes what is actually included. Bespoke becomes a description of what changes between one job and the next. Passionate usually becomes nothing, and the sentence improves.
You will find this uncomfortable in a specific way. The adjectives feel impressive and the facts feel small. The facts are what people believe.
How do I find my actual voice?
Say it out loud first, then write that down.
Almost everyone writes differently from how they speak, and worse. Something about a keyboard makes people reach for formality they would never use in a room. The result is a website that sounds like a press release and a founder who sounds like a human, and the customer meets the wrong one first.
Try this. Record yourself explaining what you do to somebody who does not know your trade. Two minutes, unrehearsed. Then transcribe it and clean it up lightly.
That transcript is usually better than anything on the current website. It is specific, it has rhythm, it explains rather than declares, and it sounds like a person who does the work.
What about writing for the customer rather than about myself?
This advice is broadly right and usually applied too literally.
The version that helps: lead with the problem the reader has rather than the history of your company. Nobody arrives caring when you were founded. They arrive with a question.
The version that hurts: removing yourself entirely, so the page becomes a series of statements about the reader’s needs with no evidence that you can meet them. Pages written this way are strangely empty, all empathy and no proof.
Both are needed. Start with their problem. Then show your work.
Does tone of voice actually matter for a small business?
More than for a large one, because it is a bigger share of what people have to go on.
A large company has a brand people already recognise. A small business is being assessed from a website, a few social posts and maybe a phone call. How you sound is a substantial part of the available evidence.
You do not need a tone of voice document with a matrix in it. Three rules cover most of it. Decide whether you say we or I and stick to it. Decide how formal you are, and err less formal than feels right. Decide what you never do, which for most businesses should include exclamation marks and words nobody says aloud.
How do I know if the writing is working?
Two tests, both cheap.
The name swap. Put your competitor’s name at the top of your page. If it still reads correctly, the page says nothing about you.
The read aloud. Read a paragraph to somebody outside your trade. Watch where they lose interest, and watch for the moment they ask a question. The question is the thing you should have led with.
Most pages fail the first test. Almost every page improves after the second.
What would I change first?
Your homepage’s first sentence.
It is the highest value line on the site and it is usually the vaguest thing on it, because it is written last and everyone is tired. One plain sentence naming what you do and who for beats a slogan, every time, and it takes twenty minutes.
We write from what a business can actually claim, because specific is the only thing a reader can check. Tell us what you are working on.
