How do you know whether your website copy is working?
You can’t usually tell by reading it yourself. I went back through my last year’s worth of client consults to see what they struggled with, and the most common complaint wasn’t design and it wasn’t tech. It was messaging and copy. These coaches knew their message and copy was lackluster, but they didn’t know how to fix it.
I’m a StoryBrand messaging guide and I’ve built over 150 websites for coaches, and let me tell you this: before you rewrite a word, here are five checks that show you where copy tends to lose people, so you can write copy that creates client conversations.
Quick Summary
- The “huh?” test: show your homepage to someone outside your industry for ten seconds, then ask what you do. A blank look means your headline isn’t landing.
- The one-person test: ask who the page is for. If the answer is “anyone,” your copy is talking to nobody in particular.
- The first-screen test: check whether the top of your homepage is about your reader’s problem or about your credentials. The problem should come first.
- The decode test: mark every phrase a stranger would have to stop and interpret, then swap each one for plain language.
- The next-step test: ask what they’d do if they wanted to work with you. Your consult link or free download should be the obvious answer.
Why Is It So Hard to Write Your Own Website Copy?
Writing your own website copy is hard because you understand your work too well to explain it simply. You skip the basics that feel obvious to you and use insider language your ideal client doesn’t, trying to say everything at once. The result reads clearly to you and confusingly to everyone else.
I see this a lot. Someone who is really good at what they do sits down to describe it and writes a generic paragraph that could belong to any coach in their niche.
Several of those years-worth-of-clients said some version of the same sentence: “I understand the concepts, I just can’t execute it on my own site.” These are people with plenty of ideas and plenty of effort. They’re stuck in a specific way, and the good news is that it shows up in specific, findable places on the page.
That’s what the checks below are for.
How Do You Know If Your Website Copy Is Working?
You find out by putting your page in front of someone who has none of the industry context you do, and watching their reaction. What questions come up for them? Ideally, after looking at your website, they can answer these questions: what you do, who it’s for, and what to do next.
Your test subject could be a friend, a neighbor, or your sister. Not a peer, and definitely not a client, because both of them already know the answers.
1. The “huh?” test
Show someone your homepage for about ten seconds, then ask what you do. If they pause and say some version of “huh?”, the page isn’t doing its first job.
One of my clients is a mindset coach for competitive dressage riders. She told me people “show up at my website and go, huh?” She knew something was off. She just couldn’t see what, because to her the page made complete sense. It was written in the language you’d find on any mindset coach’s site, and the dressage world her clients live in never showed up on the page. She wrote it from inside her own head, where she had context to make it make sense to her.
If it fails: your headline is describing your method instead of naming the outcome. Rewrite it as the plainest possible sentence about what changes for the person who hires you.
2. The one-person test
The next question your website should answer is: who is this for? If your test subject answers “anyone” or “people who want help,” your copy is talking to nobody in particular.
In my consult research, one voiceover artist couldn’t define her ideal client because, in her words, her buyers were “all over the map.” That’s the single most expensive vagueness on a website. You can genuinely help many kinds of people and still figure out the overall themes they have in common so that the website speaks to all, then create specific service pages for the unique individuals. In her case, one service page is for commercial clients, and another service page is for political candidates.
If it fails: name the person in the first two lines. Go past the demographics to the situation she’s in. “Women in their fifties whose kids have just moved out” says far more than “individuals in transition.”
3. The first-screen test
Look at your homepage without scrolling. Count how many sections are about your reader’s problem and how many are about your credentials, your certifications, and your philosophy.
Most coaching sites lead with the coach. It feels like the polite thing to do, because we want to tell people about us, right? But the answer is no, that’s actually backwards. Your visitor doesn’t care about your methodology when they first land on your site. They care whether you understand what’s keeping them up at night.
Your qualifications only matter once they’ve decided you understand their struggles.
If it fails: move the credentials down the page and open by naming the primary problem your reader feels, in their words. This is the biggest single change I make in copywriting for coaches.
4. The decode test
Read your page and mark every phrase a stranger would have to stop and interpret. Industry terms, your own framework names, anything that sounds meaningful but doesn’t describe an outcome.
This is where insider language hides. “Aligned abundance,” “holistic transformation,” “stepping into your power.” These feel rich to you because you have years of meaning packed behind them. Your reader has five seconds and no context, so a phrase they have to decode is a phrase they skip.
I hit this on a call just recently. A founder walked me through his business, and every sentence had insider terms like “agent operators” in it. So I asked him the question I use to force clarity: if a stranger found you next week and wanted to give you money, what could they buy from you today? From his own page, there was no way to answer it.
If it fails: swap each marked phrase for the plainest version of what it delivers. Less elegant is fine. Understood is the point.
5. The next-step test
Ask your stranger one more thing: what would you do if you wanted this? You want them to point straight at your consult link or your free download without hunting for it.
A good website can offer more than one next step. The page can hold a consult button and a free download and still be clear, as long as it’s organized so the first move is obvious. The trouble starts when the links that create clients get hidden. A consult link that only lives in a menu, or a lead magnet tucked into the footer, is costing you people who were ready to take that step.
I’ve watched this cost real money. One coach I worked with had a membership that had brought in over $100k, and the sales page for it was nowhere to be found on her site. In her words, she was “leaving money on the table, it’s not even funny.”
If it fails: pick the one action you most want from that page and make it unmissable. Your reader should never have to search for the way to work with you.
The Curse of Knowing Your Own Work Too Well
If you failed three of those five, you’re in very normal company, and the reason is worth understanding before you start rewriting.
There’s a name for it in psychology: the curse of knowledge. Once you know something deeply, you can’t remember what it was like not to know it. So you explain from where you are instead of from where your reader is.
Think about how a beginner and an expert describe the same thing. A brand-new coach over-explains everything because she remembers being confused. A seasoned expert skips whole steps because they feel too obvious to mention. Your website needs the beginner’s empathy and the expert’s authority at once, and holding both about your own work is genuinely hard.
I’ve felt this one myself. Sometimes I wonder if I was a better tech teacher when I was first starting out, because I was closer to the time when I’d just figured it all out, too. These days I have to work harder to teach the same tech and marketing concepts clearly.
I watch the specifics blur, too. A restorative-practices coach told me she’d “rather write a 5k research paper” than write about herself. A midlife coach knew her site looked “squirrely” without being able to say why it was that way. These are capable, articulate people who are standing too close to the thing to describe it.
It isn’t limited to newer businesses either. I’ve built sites for master certified coaches and Forbes contributors, the kind of established experts you’d assume have this nailed. Being great at what you do doesn’t hand you the words for it. If anything, the deeper your expertise, the more of it you assume everyone else shares.
So if you’ve been sitting on your website copy for months feeling like you should be able to do this, please let that go. Some of the sharpest people I know get stuck in exactly this spot, for reasons that have nothing to do with how well they write.
My free Copy Crash Course walks you through the 10 tips I use to make writing copy easier. It’s the fastest way I know to get unstuck without hiring anyone yet.
Can You Write Your Own Website Copy?
Yes, and early on you probably should. When you’re just starting out and still refining your niche, your message will keep changing, and you’re the only one close enough to keep up with it. The better question is whether writing it yourself still makes sense at your stage of business.
Copy is a communication skill. You’ll use it in your emails, your DMs, anywhere you talk with potential clients, so the practice pays off far beyond your website. When money is tight, write your own and count the practice as part of the return.
Once your business is earning and you’re investing in professional website design, hiring a good copywriter isworth it. Good design can’t carry copy that wasn’t written for it, and strong copy makes that design work much harder for you. Some web designers partner with a copywriter for this. On my projects, my team writes the copy in-house alongside the design.
There’s a third path, too. My client Dorothy Johnson wrote her own sales page copy, and she knew how to write for a website, with headings and bullets that keep a page scannable instead of paragraph after paragraph. She hired my team to redesign the page around her words, and her conversion rate went up 44%. If you write like that and you have the time, you can do the same.
When to Bring in an Outside Guide
Bring in outside help when you’ve run the checks, you know what’s broken, and you still can’t fix it, or when the stalled website is costing you clients. A page that’s sat unfinished for months is telling you something about the vantage point you can give yourself, not about your discipline.
That’s what a guide is for. A guide’s job is to see your work from the outside, ask the questions you’ve stopped being able to ask yourself, and shape the message you already have into something a stranger gets immediately. Your voice stays yours. On my projects, my team and I write the copy alongside the design, because the words and the structure have to work together to sell.
This is essentially the StoryBrand approach, the framework I use on every client site. It casts your client as the hero and you as the guide who helps them win, and it’s very good at pulling a clear message out of a fuzzy one. You can see it running on real sites in these StoryBrand website examples, and these BrandScript examples break down the messaging behind the pages.
Frequently Asked Questions About Writing Your Own Website Copy
Why can’t I write my own website copy even though I know my business?
Knowing your business deeply is what makes it hard. You’re too close to see the page the way a first-time visitor does, so you skip the obvious and blur the specifics, assuming context your reader doesn’t have. This is the curse of knowledge, and experts feel it more sharply than beginners.
Is it worth paying someone to write website copy?
It starts being worth it once your business is earning and you’re investing in a professional website design, or when stalled copy is costing you clients. What a good copywriter or StoryBrand guide really sells is an outside perspective on your own message, which is the exact thing you can’t produce alone.
How long should it take to write website copy?
Longer than you’d hope and shorter than you fear, if you have a framework. Most coaches lose weeks staring at a blank page with no structure. With clear prompts and a defined message, a solid first draft takes days.
Can AI write my website copy for me?
AI can help you draft and get past a blank page, but it can’t tell you who you’re really for or what makes you different. It will confidently produce generic copy that sounds like everyone else. The clarity has to come from you or a guide first, and then AI is useful for execution.
What’s the most common website copy mistake coaches make?
Writing about themselves instead of their client. The page leads with credentials and methodology when it should open by naming the exact problem the reader feels. If a visitor doesn’t see their own struggle in the first few lines, they never reach your qualifications.
Start With the Check, Not the Rewrite
Most people who want to know how to write website copy start by opening a blank document. Start with the five checks instead, so you know which part is broken before you spend a weekend rewriting the part that wasn’t.
You know your clients better than anyone. What you need is a way to see your own page the way they do, and that’s borrowable.
If you’re an established coach ready to hand your messaging and website to a team that does this every day, take a look at my web design services for coaches, where copy and design are built together. And if you’d rather start it yourself with the right structure, the Website Kit for Coaches gives you a coach-specific framework and an AI writing assistant so you’re never staring at a blank page. Or if you just want to talk it through, you can always get in touch.
I hope this post was helpful!
Read more: StoryBrand Website Examples That Turn Visitors Into Clients
