Hire a copywriter for your small business website

I’m Eddie, and I’m a professional copywriter. I have experience across a variety of styles – I’ve written professional copy, analysis documents for use by large organisations, SEO optimised blog posts with clear citations, creative writing, novellas, and even poetry.

Here’s the issue I see with copy: you write your own, and you know what you meant. A stranger arriving as a cold lead gets three seconds and no context, and they never leave a note explaining why they went elsewhere. Your readers bounce – but you don’t know why. Were they after info, an answer to some question, a price, or just proof you’re a real person who’ll turn up? Your analytics won’t tell you – only that they left. That’s the whole case for having someone else read it: not that you can’t write, but that you can’t see your own page.

That’s really the whole argument for bringing someone else in. Not that you can’t write – most business owners write perfectly well. It’s that a target audience is hard to understand, SEO-optimisation is an alien concept, and the market is all the more confusing with AI.

What copy quality does to your KPIs

This isn’t a matter of taste (buzz word!), and there’s evidence here.

Readability does most of the heavy lifting. Landing pages written at roughly a 5th to 7th grade reading level convert at more than double the rate of pages written in “professional” complex prose. Nobody has ever left a website because they found it too easy to understand.

Grammar also hits trust more than comprehension. Research by Disruptive Communications and Global Lingo found poor spelling and grammar were the single biggest issue UK consumers said damaged their trust in a brand, ahead of any other factor – and a majority said they’d simply refuse to use a business with obvious mistakes on its site. It’s the main factor that you, and everyone else, are being judged against – completely irrespective of your industry or business type.

Charles Duncombe, who ran the UK hosiery retailer TightsPlease, found that a category page with “Tights” misspelt as “Tihgts” was performing badly; conversion jumped by around 80% once it was fixed.

It gets cited constantly as proof that one typo costs you 80% of your sales. I don’t think it is. It was a single page, it wasn’t a controlled test, and the likeliest explanation is partly that search engines couldn’t match a misspelt keyword rather than that shoppers recoiled. What it does show is that copy errors leak money in ways that never appear in your analytics as “copy errors” – which is the actual point, and enough of one. Ahrefs, SEMRush, GSC – they won’t find this. And who’s to say whether an underperforming page is an issue, or just what that page happens to get?

Where small businesses go wrong writing their own copy

Making the business the main character.

Company history, mission statements, how long you’ve been established. None of it is what the visitor came for. Good copy makes the customer the hero and the business the means. If the first sentence on your homepage is about you rather than about their problem, they won’t engage.

Reaching for jargon to sound legitimate.

“Bespoke, purpose-driven solutions” makes you sound identical to every competitor writing exactly the same thing – which is the precise opposite of what the jargon was meant to achieve. Plain words read as more confident, not less. Your business will speak for itself.

No white space.

Using walls of text because you assume people read every word. They don’t – most visitors scan headings and subheadings looking for the bit that concerns them, and a solid block of prose gives them nothing to grab. This is a formatting problem as much as a writing one. It’s the same with AI and AEO – AI engines need well formatted text with clear subheadings.

Weak calls to action.

“Submit” and ” contact” won’t drive conversions.

One fix you can make in the next ten minutes

Find your main call-to-action buttons and read them.

If it says “Submit”, “Learn More” or “Click Here”, replace it with the outcome the visitor actually gets. “Get my free quote.” “Book a call.” “See my price.” Personalised, specific CTAs consistently and substantially outperform generic ones, and this takes all of a couple minutes.

It’s likely the best ROI you’ll get on 5 minutes of your time, and you don’t need me to do it.

What it costs to hire a copywriter in the UK

Full website copy for a standard five to ten page site runs £1,000–£5,000. Individual landing or service pages sit at £200–£800. A properly researched 1,000-word SEO blog post is £150–£500, with long-form pillar content at £300–£1,000. Experienced UK freelancer day rates sit around £440–£480, per the ProCopywriters annual industry survey.

My rates sit nowhere near that day rate. You’re getting a sole trader’s price rather than an agency’s, without cutting the research or the rewrites – those are where the value actually is.

The floor is worth knowing too. Anything under roughly 3p a word is almost always unedited AI output or a content mill, and you’ll spend more fixing it than you saved.

How much do you cost?

I usually operate on a retainer basis, with clients paying monthly to receive a discounted rate, and a certain number of blog posts a month – usually between 2 and 4, although I can do more. This is the best move when you’re trying to boost your site SEO independently.

Why AI hasn’t replaced human copywriters

AI has commoditised the bottom of the market, which has made good human writing more valuable rather than less.

Google has been explicit that it doesn’t penalise content for being AI-assisted. What it demotes is low-quality, unedited output. So the advantage of human writing was never about dodging a penalty – it’s a human that takes the time to understand your business, and therefore is more likely to write something worth reading. Analyses of top-ranking pages consistently find human-created content dominating the first position, and that’s the reason why, rather than any hidden rule.

Your leads also prefer human content – 86% of consumers say AI-generated content should be disclosed, and AI is accepted on average by 53%, and is significantly lower in influencer marketing
(28%) and news (21%) (YouGov). Take a second to think about those numbers – more than half of your leads instantly distrusting your brand because they feel content is AI-y.

The place most businesses are landing is hybrid. AI is useful for structure and research. Not for getting past a blank page though – creativity is a human quality. Voice, judgement and knowing which of your customers’ objections need attention remain human too.

Anja A had me on three marketing projects and described the value and human creativity I bring:

“Listened to the brief but also offered his own ideas. Very happy with the end results.”

Working from your brief, not replacing it. That’s what I do.

Blog content that earns its keep

Most small business blogs are written for traffic rather than buyers – “2026 trends” pieces that get read by other people in your industry and convert nobody.

What actually generates enquiries is bottom-of-funnel content: “best HR software for UK startups” rather than “2026 HR trends”. Source it from real conversations with customers, in their words, using the pain points, issues, and objections they raise to you. That is one of the most important things you can get from your customers – not just word of mouth referrals and their money. The questions your customers ask you on the phone are a better content plan than any keyword tool will give you.

Frequently Asked Questions — Hire a Copywriter for Your Small Business Website

Can you match my brand voice, or will it sound like you?

I work from your existing content, tone and any guidelines you have. The aim is copy that sounds like a better-rested version of you, not like someone else wrote it.

Do you use AI to write it?

I use it for market research if necessary, and to trawl through large amounts of qualitative data if I feel it would save a significant amount of time. However, every piece is written, edited and finished by me – which is the whole point, given everything above.

Can you build the page the copy goes on?

Yes. Copy is often part of a wider website design project, and doing both together is usually cheaper and always faster than coordinating two people.

I’ve written my own copy and just want it checked. Is that a thing?

It’s one of the most common requests I get, and often the cheapest fix. Send what you’ve got and I’ll let you know what needs a rewrite and which are fine as is. Sometimes you’re best off leaving the old content alone, and focusing on writing new content.

Will better copy help with search rankings too?

It helps, but they’re different jobs. If search visibility is the problem, SEO for service businesses is the more useful starting point.

Ready for Copy That Actually Converts? Get in Touch with Key2

If your website copy is something you wrote in an evening and have quietly worried about ever since, get in touch for a free, no-obligation discovery call. I’ll tell you what’s working and what isn’t – including the bits you don’t need to pay me to change.