Q&A › Words & photos
Why most business websites say nothing, what photography is worth, and how much writing you actually have to do.
The design gets the attention and the words do the work. A beautiful page that says nothing specific converts nobody.
Because "quality service and competitive prices" describes every business that has ever existed, so it persuades nobody and matches no search. Specifics — what you do, for whom, where, at what price — are simultaneously what convinces a reader and what a search engine can match.
Less than you fear, but not none. Nobody else knows your prices, your process or the three questions every customer asks. A good arrangement is that you supply the facts and someone else makes them read well.
For anything where appearance is the product — salons, restaurants, contractors showing finished work — it is the highest-return money on the whole project. For a service business where nobody cares what the office looks like, it matters much less.
No. Image owners pursue this routinely and the demands are expensive. Use your own photos, properly licensed stock, or nothing. "It was on Google Images" is not a licence.
It is neutral when it illustrates something and bad when it pretends to be you. A stock photo of a generic team in a boardroom tells a visitor you had nothing real to show. One real photo of your actual counter beats ten polished fakes.
As long as it takes to answer the question, and no longer. Service pages usually need more than people write; home pages usually need less. Padding a page to hit a word count makes it worse, including for search.
Only if you will keep it up. Three posts from 2023 look worse than no blog at all. If writing regularly is not realistic, a well-maintained FAQ or guide section does the same job for search without the implied promise of recency.
It holds attention and shows things words struggle with — a process, a space, a finished job. It does not need to be expensive; a steady phone video of real work often outperforms a polished advert. What matters is that it shows something true.
A short description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines to understand the picture. Describe what the image shows in plain words. Purely decorative images should have it left deliberately empty, so assistive software skips them.
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