How the page is structured, and how the copy is written

Carl asked for this directly: *"Can you also share exactly how you structure the sections, and a

few sentences how you think of the copy there etc (to be working even if you like have not much

copy to go on)."*

That last clause is the whole problem. For most leads we have a phone number, a town, a Google

rating and somewhere between 48 and 800 words of their own website. That is it. Everything below

is designed to produce a persuasive page from almost nothing without inventing anything.

The order of the page, and why

The sequence answers the questions a homeowner asks, in the order they ask them. Nobody scrolls

looking for "About us". They scroll because a question has not been answered yet.

#	Section	The unspoken question	What it must not do
1	Hero	Am I in the right place, and are these people any good?	Say the town three times
2	Reviews	Has this gone well for anyone like me?	Read as decoration
3	Services	Can they do my specific job?	List nouns
4	Process	What am I actually signing up for?	Promise things we cannot know
5	About	Who turns up at my house?	Talk about the business to the business
6	Work	Has anyone near me had this done?	Appear at all unless earned
7	Areas	Will they even come out to me?	Look like a broken filter
8	Enquiry	What happens if I get in touch?	Make them do homework first

Two deliberate choices in that order.

Reviews sit second, not near the bottom. On a firm with 85 reviews and 200 words of their

own writing, the reviews are the campaign. They are verified, specific, free, and written in

exactly the register the next customer thinks in. Ours is the one section on the page not

written by us, which is precisely why it is the most persuasive. On a lead with fewer than three

harvested quotes it moves down, because a thin review section is worse than none.

The work gallery is conditional. gallery-gate.mjs refuses it unless there are four photos

clearing 1200x600 and 90KB, and it can never contain stock or generated imagery. A three-image

gallery of soft photographs advertises that the firm has nothing to show.

How the copy is written when there is almost nothing to go on

Six rules, in the order I apply them.

1. Specifics beat adjectives, and specifics are free.

Ogilvy's most famous line was a measurement, not an adjective. We cannot claim a firm is

"professional" and nor would anyone believe it, but we can say the timber leaves as boards, logs

or chip. Every "quality workmanship" gets deleted and replaced with a fact or nothing.

2. Their reviews are the source material.

The single most useful thing on a thin lead is the review text. "Planning permission, stump

grinding, 34 metres of fencing" is unfakeable and tells the next customer more than a paragraph

we could write. Where the reviews are strong, lead with the most specific one, not the most

flattering.

3. Every heading answers a worry rather than labelling a box.

"Services" labels a box. "Dead, leaning, or too close to the house" answers the question the

reader arrived with. Same content, and one of them gets read.

4. Second person, always, and never about the business.

The reader is a homeowner with a problem and three tabs open. Not the business owner, and never

the agency. "Photographed on their own jobs" and "nothing has been added to fill the grid" both

shipped once, and both were notes to Carl that ended up on a customer's site. There is a gate

for this now.

5. Where a fact is missing, the sentence is cut, not filled.

This is the rule that makes thin leads work. If we do not know how they price, there is no

pricing sentence. Not a vague one. The temptation is always to write "competitive pricing" or

"fast, friendly service", and those are worth less than the whitespace.

6. What we do not know, we do not promise.

Timing, pricing practice, guarantees, staffing, insurance, certifications. Every one is

persuasive and cheap to write, and I have written all of them at some point and had to strip

them back out. scripts/qa.mjs now fails the build on the whole family, so it is enforced

rather than remembered.

Where the words actually come from

Three layers, merged, cheapest first. No model runs in the per-site path, which is what keeps

the marginal cost of site number 30 identical to site number 1.

Niche defaults (template/content.mjs, NICHE_COPY in build-v2.mjs) — written once per

niche. Section headings, the process, the services vocabulary, the FAQs.

Per-lead copy (template/leads-copy*.mjs) — written from their own published material:

their site text from the rendered DOM, their verified reviews. This is the only layer that

contains facts about a specific business, and every line in it is traceable to a source.

Lead record fields — name, town, phone, rating, areas.

The per-lead layer is the real bottleneck. Everything else is free and instant.

The two hero styles

Both ship on every site, switchable from the header.

Style 1, full-bleed photograph. Default. The picture argues before a word is read. Needs

one genuinely strong image.

Style 2, split. More words visible at once and it survives weaker imagery. The fallback.

What is deliberately absent

No pricing claims, no response times, no guarantees, no "fully insured" unless their own site

says it, in which case it is attributed.

No stock or generated image in any gallery, ever, and a footer disclosure where generated

imagery is used at all.

No review count or rating on printed postcards. Numbers go stale between printing and landing;

a wrong number reads as carelessness. Cards carry only durable facts.

No trade-insider phrasing. "From the first call to the last barrow out" was written and cut

the same day: you only recognise it if you do this for a living, and the reader does not.