Your client knows the business. They don't know copy.
Your client finally sends the Services document. It opens with “We pride ourselves on delivering exceptional solutions,” and you still can’t tell what a customer gets. When clients can’t write website copy, ask for the facts behind one customer job, then have the agreed writer turn those answers into a page.
You can edit sentences. You can’t edit information that isn’t there. Replacing “exceptional solutions” with something shorter won’t tell you whether the gardening service includes tree removal or which neighborhoods the team covers.
The client may explain all of that clearly on a call. Your request needs to bring out that knowledge without requiring them to become a copywriter first.
Why can your client explain the business but not write the page?
In a sales conversation, the customer supplies context. They describe an overgrown garden, mention that they’re away most weeks, and ask whether someone can visit monthly. Your client answers a specific problem. They don’t have to decide which of every possible customer question belongs in the first paragraph.
An empty Services document removes those cues. Now the owner has to choose an audience, decide what matters, arrange the information, and find a tone that sounds professional. They might know the work inside out and still have no useful way to start.
So you get either a slogan or everything. One client sends three sentences about quality. Another sends the company’s history, equipment list, and every job they’ve ever accepted, because leaving anything out feels like misrepresenting the business.
Neither response tells you they don’t care. Look at what is missing: customer context, scope, or a decision about which offer to feature. Those are things you can ask about directly. “Make this more engaging” sends them back to the same writing task.
What should you ask instead of “write your Services copy”?
Start with one service and one recognizable customer situation. Your client shouldn’t need to picture a finished website to answer. Replace requests for writing with questions about work they already do:
| The writing request | The factual question |
|---|---|
| Write a headline for this service. | What happened that made the last customer contact you? |
| Describe your ideal audience. | Who books this service, and who do you usually refer elsewhere? |
| Explain your unique selling point. | What’s one thing you do on a normal visit that customers notice? |
| Write the service description. | What happens during the job, and what isn’t included? |
| Add something about your process. | After someone contacts you, what do you need before you can book the work? |
| Give us a strong proof point. | Can you show a completed job or a confirmed fact that supports this claim? |
| Write a call to action. | Should a new customer call, request a quote, or book directly? What happens next? |
You don’t need to send every question at once. If the service and audience are already clear, ask only about the missing scope and booking step. For the rest of the site, the page-by-page website content template gives you a broader set of factual requests. Sending them through a website content collection tool or a shared document keeps each answer next to the section it belongs to.
Tell the client how rough the answer can be. “Bullet points are fine. Say what you’d tell someone asking about this service on the phone” sets a usable standard. Asking for 300 words adds another condition they have to satisfy before they can send anything.
Allow “I don’t know” too. An uncertain price or an undecided service area needs a business decision. It shouldn’t become a confident sentence just because the form requires an answer.
How do you get past “quality, service, and experience”?
Ask for an event. “Why are you different?” invites an opinion about the business. “Tell me about the last time a customer mentioned your service” gives the client something to remember.
If they answer “We communicate well,” ask what that looked like on a recent job. Did someone call before arrival, send a photo after the work, or explain a change to the estimate before proceeding? The answer may produce a useful detail. It may also reveal that the claim has no consistent practice behind it.
Keep the follow-up neutral. “Do you send a photo after every visit?” checks a claim. “You send photos after every visit, right?” nudges the client toward an answer that would be convenient for your draft. You’re gathering facts, not getting permission for a line you’ve already decided to write.
The same approach works with a long answer. If the client gives you ten years of history, ask which part affects a customer’s choice today. A new piece of equipment might matter because it lets the team work through a narrow gate. Its model number may not belong on the page at all.
You can preserve the source notes without publishing all of them. Leaving a detail out of one service section doesn’t mean losing it forever.
What does rough input look like as actual website copy?
Imagine you’re writing a garden maintenance section for a small local business. This is an illustrative example, not a real client’s claim. Your questions produce these answers:
Mostly homeowners in Ballard and Greenwood. They call when the garden gets away from them and they can’t keep up. We visit monthly for weeding, pruning, and seasonal bed care. No tree removal or lawn mowing. We look at the garden before quoting. They should request a visit through the contact form. We send photos after each maintenance visit.
That paragraph isn’t polished. It’s usable. It tells you who the service is for, where it operates, what’s included, what’s excluded, how pricing starts, and what the visitor should do next.
A draft based on those answers could be:
Monthly garden care in Ballard and Greenwood
Keep your garden cared for when you can’t keep up with it yourself. Our monthly visits cover weeding, pruning, and seasonal bed care, with photos sent after each visit.
We visit your garden before preparing a quote. Tree removal and lawn mowing aren’t included.
Button: Request a garden visit
The writer has selected and arranged the facts. They haven’t added a guarantee, a price, or a claim that the business is the area’s leading provider. The geographic detail makes the headline useful without needing an invented slogan.
Now check the interpretation. Does “pruning” include large shrubs? Are monthly visits available year-round? Does the form actually let someone request a visit? Those are specific questions for the next review. Don’t expand the draft to answer them until the client confirms the details.
What if your client gives you nothing in writing?
Change the way you collect the answers. Offer a 15-minute call about one service, a short voice note, or an existing estimate with private customer details removed. Pick the method your client can complete and your writer can use.
For the call, spend the first few minutes on a recent inquiry. Then ask what the customer bought, what happened during the work, and what they needed to know before booking. Use the remaining time to check the facts you heard. If you want to record, ask first; notes can be enough.
Don’t begin by reading a full website questionnaire aloud. Follow the concrete example while it is fresh. When the owner says “That job was unusual,” ask what would happen on a typical job and keep the exception separate.
An existing estimate can reveal inclusions and exclusions that never appeared in the original draft. A current brochure can supply service names. Neither is automatically ready for publication: ask which parts are current and which details the client is comfortable showing publicly.
If they can’t explain the offer even in conversation, copywriting may not be the immediate blocker. Ask them to choose which service they’re selling and to whom before you draft around guesses.
Who turns the answers into copy?
Name the writer before offering this workflow. Asking the client for facts doesn’t make writing free or assign it to your designer by default. Your studio might write the page, a separate copywriter might use your notes, or the client might have someone responsible for the final draft.
Make the handoff explicit:
You provide rough answers and current source material. Our writer drafts the agreed pages from those inputs. You review the draft for accuracy before we use it in the website.
If the project originally required the client to supply finished copy, agree on the added writing work before taking it on. The interview, draft, and revisions still take time. A simpler client task changes who does the work; it doesn’t remove the work.
For a process that covers owners, files, and approvals across the whole project, use how to get website content from clients. Here, your immediate goal is enough confirmed material to write one useful section.
How do you review the draft without reopening the writing task?
Don’t send the page with “Any thoughts?” and wait for someone to rewrite it. Ask the client to check the facts you used and identify anything a customer might misunderstand.
For the gardening example, the review can be short:
Confirm the two neighborhoods, the three included tasks, and the two exclusions. Is sending photos after every maintenance visit accurate? Does “request a garden visit” describe what happens when someone submits the form?
Keep factual corrections separate from preferences about phrasing. “We also serve Phinney Ridge” changes the offer. “Can we sound more premium?” needs a conversation about language and audience. Resolving one shouldn’t obscure the other.
Hold unsupported details out of the draft. A note that says “maybe 200 regular customers” is an open question, not a statistic to round up. If a number would strengthen the page, ask who can confirm it and where it came from.
At your next kickoff, replace “send your Services copy” with a request about one recent customer and the work you did for them. You can see whether it worked: the response contains enough facts to draft the section, and the client can verify the resulting words without writing the page from scratch.