How to write copy for a service page

Content Marketing

What does copywriting have to do with cooking a roast dinner?

Answer: they both require a general recipe that you can personalise, a bringing together of multiple elements (dishes) and a defined objective!

Everyone adapts their roast dinner recipe to suit their family’s tastes, and similarly, when thinking about how to write copy for a service page, it’s best to approach advice as “guidelines” rather than rules.

Writing great copy for your service page requires you to synthesise information about your target audience, competitors and keyword research to help you decide what elements to include on your page. Only then will you get the desired outcome – a user who takes action and becomes a lead. 

In this “how to” guide I include lots of ideas, but you may determine that they’re not all necessary in your niche. You’ll need to select the elements that best suit your needs.

But first, what’s the point of copywriting?

What’s the aim of copywriting? 

Copywriting has a different aim than content writing. Rather than simply educating your audience, good copywriting educates, persuades and encourages users to take action. 

In the case of service page copy, it needs to:

• Educate your audience about the benefits of your service
• Explain the key features of your service
• Remove objections or concerns they may have
• Prove your competence
• Tell your audience what action to take next (e.g. make an enquiry)

So, let’s get started. 

How to write copy for a service page

Stage One: Research

Analyse your competitors

To begin with, perform a competitor analysis to see the information that the competitors include on their service pages. 

Your aim is to make sure that your service pages include similar, if not better, information than those of your competitors. So, we need to include all the features of the top-ranking competitor and then aim to surpass it. 

1. Using an incognito browser, type in the seed keyword you want to target and look at the top 3 competitors. 

2. Complete a grid like this:

	Competitor 1	Competitor 2	Competitor 3
Do they mention any benefits of this service? What are they?
What social proof do they include? Testimonies, reviews?
Do they include a value proposition? What is it?
What features does the service include?
Do they mention any pain points that the user might have? What are they?
What other features do they include? (e.g. FAQs, pricing, process etc)

3. List the content elements that you will need to include to surpass the client’s competitors. 

Check the capacity of the service page template. 

Each website is built differently. You will need to look at the website page template in question and familiarise yourself with the layout. You cannot add text where there is no textbox! 

Map out the template on a Google Doc so that you know how you’ll need to structure your website page. Here’s an example:

As you go through, you can add your copy under the different subheadings. This helps you to make sure you’re including everything. 

Understand who you’re writing to.

Make sure you know who your audience is going to be. Every brand has a target audience – the people that they are trying to reach. 

Here are some examples:

• A recruitment agency based in London has two target audiences: candidates looking for a job and businesses looking for employees. 
• An employee benefits broker’s target audience includes those in HR roles in businesses with 50-250 employees all over the UK. 
• A commercial cleaning company’s target audience includes office managers of SMEs within 50 miles of their headquarters. 

But within each target audience, you have subsets of prospects. You can draw up descriptions of these subsets to help better understand and define your target audience. These descriptions are called user personas. 

Here’s an example of a user persona. 

A user persona contains information such as:

• Demographic information
• Likes and motivations
• Dislikes and objections
• Goals
• Frustrations and pain points
• Behaviours
• Needs and expectations
• Offer and messaging

Which user persona or target audience is your page aiming to speak to?

Your page’s copy will need to highlight benefits, pain points, and features that are relevant to them. 

Stage Two: Start writing your copy

Now you’ve done your research it’s time to write your first draft. 

1. Empathise and relate

Start by showing that you understand the user’s pain points. Here are some examples:

Example 1:

“You’re good at what you do, of course you are! And yet it is a struggle to get others to see it.

You have to compete on price, unable to stand out in a crowded marketplace and it’s impossible to get prospects to see you as the go-to solution. We’ve worked with enough businesses to see these pains time after time.”

Example 2:

“We understand the frustration that slow reporting and poor response times can cause. These types of unnecessary delays add to the operational disruption caused by unplanned shutdowns and regular site maintenance.” 

You can find the pain points in several ways:

• User personas. 
• Google reviews. Skim read the Google reviews for our client and their competitors. What are some of the common complaints that come up? 
• Competitor analysis. What are some of the pain points that the competitors have written into? 

2. Present the solution

Once you have laid the foundation, explain that you have the solution. 

Example 1:

“But to grow, you need SEO.

Our SEO campaigns (Search Engine Optimisation) can unlock that potential, ensuring your website is working hard to bring in inbound enquiries from a wide client base. It’s the final stage in our KnowShowGrow Framework and is where the hard work really begins.”

Example 2:

“Our contract lift service is the perfect solution for those wanting a fully managed turnkey lifting service for projects with a complex, specialist single lift or multiple lifting requirements.”

3. Identify and describe the three main benefits of the service

Personally, I like to then highlight some of the main benefits that the service will bring a client. 

Be careful. Benefits are not the same thing as features. Features are what your service does, and benefits are what your service does for your clients.‍

Feature: This car gets up to 40 miles per litre‍

Benefit: This car will help you save money on petrol while you’re commuting to work.

What are the 3 main benefits that the client would get from this service? 

I often like to summarise the benefit with a headline, and then unpack how in the following sentence. 

Examples:

• Quick turnarounds. Our solutions are available at short notice, 7 days a week, every day of the year.
• Complete Turnkey Solution. Save time searching for multiple contractors. We can support you from project tender applications right the way through to implementation and management.
• Remain compliant with all regulatory requirements with our BINDT-approved system. 

4. Detail the features of the service

Write down the features of the service in question. What do they get as part of this service? 

How you lay this out can give great clarity to readers. 

For example, lots of businesses offer various packages or levels of service. If this is your business, consider setting out the features in separate columns. This will help prospects understand which features are available with each level of service. 

5. Add a process

Sometimes prospective customers can really benefit from understanding how to go about accessing the service. This is known as the “process”. 

For example:‍

1. Schedule a consultation
2. One of our experts will create a custom quote
3. Upon approval, we’ll begin the installation
4. Sit back and enjoy your new patio

6. Add a “Why choose [insert company name]?” section

Each company has unique reasons that make them stand out from the competition. These are called their USPs (their “Unique Selling Points). 

A great way to lay out this section is by including subheadings that you then explain. Here’s an example:

Why use NDT Group? 

Comprehensive service 

Our EEMUA tank inspections encompass every aspect of assessment, ensuring compliance with the rigorous standards set forth by EEMUA, saving you time, money and energy. 

Smooth process 

When you work with us, there is no need to go anywhere else. We manage the whole process from inspection to Fit-for-Service report. 

Manage your assets

Our detailed analysis provides you with actionable insights into the condition of your tanks, empowering you to make informed decisions regarding maintenance, repair, and overall asset management.

Qualified EEMUA 159 inspector 

You don’t need to go anywhere else. Save time and hassle with our complete in-house service. 

7. Add a “push”

The top 3 objections to most services are almost always around

• time,
• money,
• energy.

So, speaking into those objections and explaining how you can save them time, money and energy is a really powerful push that you can add if it’s relevant. 

This can be done at the beginning and end of your service page. Here is an example of a “push”.

“So, if you want a curated employee benefits package without the hassle of searching for the best solution, contact our team, who will be delighted to do the hard work for you”. 

8. Write a FAQ section

Rather than clog up the main service copy with lots of dense text, we tend to build FAQ sections for many of our client websites. 

FAQs are Frequently Asked Questions sections. The answers tend to be concise answers (about the size of a paragraph or less). FAQs tend to be included at the bottom of the sales page. 

FAQs not only help prospective clients understand the intricacies of your service, but they also give great opportunities for your page to win organic traffic in the organic search results. Google often scrapes and uses FAQs to form a Featured Snippet or answer for the “People Also Ask” section of the result pages.

Here’s an example of a Featured Snippet. You can see the website that the snippet is taken from just below it. 

Pages that rank for Featured Snippets often get loads of organic traffic coming to their website. This helps improve the overall rank of the website. 

Here’s what the People Also Ask section looks like. Users can click on the little chevrons to read the answers to the questions.

So, how can you figure out what FAQs you should include? Here are some ideas:

• Keyword research. What longtail (question) keywords have been asked specifically about this service? Do some keyword research to find out. Include those keywords as the title of the FAQ and then draft a concise response. 
• Competitor’s websites. Do any of your competitors have FAQs on their service pages and if so what are they? Are there any common ones that suggest lots of customers are asking these questions? 
• User personas. Using the user personas you’ve drawn up, identify if there are any service-specific questions that get asked frequently, and if so, write answers for them. 
• Sales team. Interview your sales team and find out what common questions they’re encountering when they speak to prospects. Write FAQs in response. 

9. Include a “perfect for you if…” if relevant

“Perfect for you if…” sections are great if the service is tailored to a subset of the target market (e.g. a beginner’s online course).

Just bullet point the types of people who would particularly benefit from your service.

Example:

Our “Saying hello” package is perfect if…

• You have a start-up business
• You have a small budget (under £400 per month)
• You have never done SEO before and so want to try it out.

10. Case studies & social proof

The aim of your service page is not just to describe the features of your service, but to persuade the reader to take action. 

Case studies and other forms of social proof such as testimonials and reviews are a fantastic way to prove competency and remove any lingering doubts about your service in the mind of your readers. 

Examples of possible headings include:

• Our [insert service] in action
• See how we work
• What our clients think

There are lots of different ways to add social proof to your service page:

• Pull through of case studies that are relevant to the service page in question. 
• Pull through of your star rating from your Google Business Profile page. 
• Slide show of testimonials from happy clients. 

11. Include Call to Action (CTA)

So, you’ve explained the benefits of the service, and the features, eliminated objections, provided evidence of competency and generally dazzled with your industry knowledge in your FAQs. What next?

Now we aim to get them to take action. 

Ask yourself: what is the next stage of the sales funnel for this reader? Is it:

• Make an Enquiry
• Opt into a newsletter
• Download a lead magnet

Whatever the next “stage” is, that’s what we need to include as the CTA. CTAs tend to be short snappy pieces of text. They tend to be situated on buttons that the user needs to click. So:

• Make an enquiry becomes “Enquire now”
• Opt into a newsletter becomes “Join our community”
• Download a lead magnet becomes “Download”

12. Make sure the brand tone is right

It might be that your brand has a particular “tone” “archetype” or “personality” that you want to convey. 

If that is the case, you need to review your copy to ensure that it is written with the brand personality in mind. 

Phew! So, that’s the writing done. 

Stage Three: Make sure it will rank 

13. Optimise the page’s copy for search

Next, we need to make sure that the service page will rank well on Google. To do this we need to “optimise” the copy. 

Your service page can rank independently from your homepage and bring prospects in through a “side door” onto your website. 

1. Conduct some keyword research and identify a good keyword that you’d like to target. Make sure it’s not too competitive and has a decent search volume. This will be your focus keyword. 
2. You then need to add this keyword in specific positions. Redraft your copy to include the keyword so that it reads naturally. Include the keyword in:
   1. Your title
   2. Your introduction
   3. In a subheading (use a synonym in another subheading if possible)
   4. 2 or 3 other locations on the page in the main body of the text. 
3. Be mindful of the copy around your keyword. Use full sentences so that search engines can understand the context of your keyword. 

14. Optimise the page’s metadata

Once you’re happy with the copy you’ve written, it’s important to optimise the metadata that describes your page. 

Metadata means “data about data”. It’s the information you send to search engines to help them understand what the page is about. 

Here’s how metadata appears on search engine results pages:

You can add metadata to your page using an SEO plugin such as Yoast. 

1. Add alt text to your featured image. Aim to include your focus keyword. Alt text should adequately describe the contents of the image.
2. Write a meta title. Include the focus keyword at the beginning of the title. 
3. Write a description that hooks the reader in. Aim to include the focus keyword, and use wording that would encourage someone scanning the results pages to click on your link. 

Writing copy for a service page

Writing effective copy for a service page is much like following a recipe: it requires a thoughtful blend of research, understanding of the audience, and strategic content placement to achieve the desired outcome. By thoroughly researching competitors, clearly defining the target audience, and structuring the page with relevant benefits, features, and CTAs, you can create persuasive copy that not only educates but also drives action. Remember, the ultimate goal is to guide users through the sales funnel, addressing their pain points and proving your service’s value, all while optimising the content for search engines to ensure visibility.