✎Writing texts

Decide once and stick to it. A switch in the middle of the website is noticed by everyone and looks sloppy.

As a guide (in German, this is the choice between the informal “du” and the formal form):

• Formal (“Sie”) if you work with businesses, public authorities, older customers or in traditional trades.
• Informal (“du”) if your customers use it themselves — clubs, sport, creative industries, young target groups.

More important than the form of address is closeness: write the way you speak, only without the filler words. The test: read a paragraph aloud. If you stumble over it or it sounds embarrassing, it is not yours.

Avoid the passive and the impersonal “one”. “We will come round and take a look” beats “An inspection will be carried out”.

Three things, in this order:

1. What you do — in one sentence, with the location if you work regionally. “Painting and facades in Dresden and the surrounding area.”
2. For whom, and what the customer gets out of it — not your equipment, but their result.
3. How to reach you — phone number, as far up as possible.

Everything else is a bonus.

The most common mistake is the run-up: “A warm welcome to our website. We are delighted that you have found your way to us.” Those are two sentences with nothing in them, and they are exactly the two sentences in which most visitors decide whether to stay.

Delete them. Start with the substance.

What someone wants to know before letting you into their home or transferring money: who you are, since when, and why they should trust you.

What works:

• Names and faces. A photo of the team beats any wording.
• A concrete story. How the business came about, what has changed, who took it over.
• Figures that are true. Founded in 1987, seven employees, second location since 2019.

What does not work: lists of values. “Quality, reliability, customer focus” — every business claims this, which is why nobody believes it. If you want to write about reliability, write instead about what you do when an appointment cannot be kept.

And write in the “we” form. A business that talks about itself in the third person sounds like a press release.

From the customer’s point of view, not the business’s. The difference:

• Business view: “We have a machine park with a CNC milling machine.”
• Customer view: “Made-to-measure fitted furniture, even for crooked walls.”

The same fact, but only the second answers a question someone is asking.

The structure that almost always works, for each service:

1. What it is, in one sentence.
2. Who it is worthwhile for — and who it is not. That builds more trust than any list.
3. How it works, in three or four steps.
4. Roughly what it costs, if you can say.

And: one service, one page, as soon as there is more than a paragraph. That is also the way to be found for individual services.

Shorter than you think — but not so short that there is nothing in them.

As a guide:

• Home page: two to five sentences per section.
• Service page: 200 to 400 words. That is enough to say something and short enough to be read.
• About us: 150 to 300 words plus images.
• Blog post: whatever the topic needs. Better 300 good words than 900 padded ones.

The rule of thumb for everything: every sentence must say something new. If a sentence only repeats the mood of the previous one, it can go.

And the trick that always works: write too long first, then cut a third. It never makes the text worse.

These six things, and the text gets better every time:

• The run-up. The first sentence of a paragraph is often just warming up.
• “Gladly”, “of course”, “naturally”. They say nothing and come across as servile.
• Duplications. “Individual and tailor-made” is the same thing twice.
• Claims without evidence. “Highest quality”, “leading provider”, “many years of experience”.
• Filler words. “Actually”, “basically”, “so to speak”, “also”.
• Anything in the passive. “Advice is given” has no one doing anything — write who does what.

Do this with one text and read the result. After that you will do it automatically.

The ones that appear on every other website — that is exactly why they no longer work:

• “A warm welcome to our homepage.”
• “We are your competent partner for …”
• “Quality, reliability, customer satisfaction.”
• “Simply get in touch with us.”
• “We look forward to your enquiry.”
• “Individual solutions for your requirements.”

The common denominator: they are interchangeable. Replace each one with something that is only true of you.

Instead of “competent partner for electrical installation”: “We do electrical installation in old buildings, and we tell you beforehand if the wiring has to come out.”

As raw material, yes; as the end result, no.

What works well:

• Getting past the start. A suggestion on the screen is easier to improve than an empty field.
• Rewording. Having your own, overlong text shortened.
• Suggesting a structure. Which sections a service page needs.

What does not work: adopting the suggestion unread. AI texts are fluent and empty — they contain exactly the clichés that appear everywhere, because that is what they learnt from. Anyone who leaves them in place gets a website that sounds like all the others.

The approach that has proven itself: get a suggestion, cut everything generic, put in the concrete details from your own business. What remains is usually a third — and that is the good part.

A heading has one job: to say what is underneath it — not to make people curious.

What works:

• Concrete. “A new bathroom in five days” instead of “Our strengths”.
• Short. Under 60 characters, otherwise it wraps on a phone.
• Without exclamation marks. They do not make a sentence more important, just louder.

What does not work: puns that need explaining, and questions without an answer (“Did you know …?”).

Subheadings are the most effective remedy against walls of text. Anyone scrolling reads the headings first and uses them to decide where to start reading.

And: one main heading per page. Everything else is subordinate, for search engines too.

You have to use the words your customers use — that is all there is to it nowadays.

In practice this means:

• Write what you do the way people search for it. Anyone searching for “drain cleaning” will not find a page that only says “sanitary engineering services”.
• Name the location if you work regionally. “Electrician in Radebeul” is a search query; “electrical installation” is just a field.
• One topic per page. A page that covers everything is found for nothing.

What you should not do: squeeze the same word in twenty times. Fifteen years ago that was a trick; today it is a disadvantage — quite apart from making the text unreadable.

The best search engine text is a good text for people.

You do not — which is why you need a detour. The brain reads what it wrote, not what is there.

What helps, in increasing order of effectiveness:

1. Leave it for a day. The cheapest trick, and it works.
2. Read it aloud. You hear missing words and crooked sentences instead of reading over them.
3. Read it backwards, sentence by sentence from the bottom. That breaks the flow of meaning and makes typos visible.
4. Have someone else read it. Ideally someone who does not know the business.

And most importantly: check figures and names separately. A typo is embarrassing; a wrong phone number costs you orders.

Consistently — that matters more than any individual rule.

What is customary on German-language pages:

• Prices: 1.250 € or 1.250,00 €, with a full stop as the thousands separator and a comma for cents. The euro sign after the number.
• Phone numbers: in groups that can be repeated back on the phone — 0351 65 56 10 75. As a clickable link for calls from a mobile.
• Date: 3. Oktober 2026 in running text, 03.10.2026 in lists.
• Times: 8–17 Uhr with an en dash, not a hyphen.

And the rule broken most often: numbers up to twelve are written out in running text, from 13 onwards as digits. For measurements and prices, always digits.

Technical terms: yes, if your customers know them. They are even helpful then, because they show that you know your trade, and because people search for them.

Abbreviations: sparingly, and spelt out the first time.

The touchstone is always the same question: Who reads this?

• A page for property developers may write “ETICS”.
• A page for homeowners writes “insulation on the facade” and adds the technical term after it.

Where you are unsure: write both. “External thermal insulation composite system (ETICS)” costs a few words and excludes nobody — and is found by both groups.

With half a page of agreements, written once and then used:

• Form of address: informal or formal.
• How you refer to yourselves: “we”, “the club”, the company name — one of them.
• Spellings that come up in your texts: product names, place names, technical terms.
• What does not appear: the clichés you have agreed to do without.

This is not a rulebook, it is a note. It prevents the discussions that would otherwise start afresh with every text.

And in practice: one person reads everything at the end. Not as censorship, but so that one ear is over everything.

No. Texts are protected by copyright, including product descriptions, and even if there is no notice anywhere.

This expressly also applies to:

• Texts by the manufacturer whose products you sell — unless they expressly permit it.
• Texts from your own old website, if an agency wrote them and the rights were not transferred. Check the old contract.
• Texts from trade association material, if their use is not regulated.

Law aside: it does not help. A text that appears word for word on twenty sites is treated by search engines as a duplicate, and your customers notice that there is nothing of your own there.

What is allowed: taking inspiration and writing it in your own words.

By five things that you check in a round twice a year:

• Years. “For over 20 years” stops being true at some point, and “since 2019” reads differently from how it did back then.
• Names. Staff who are no longer there. Embarrassing and questionable in terms of data protection.
• Prices and services. Anything you no longer offer belongs off the page.
• Images. A vehicle with an old logo, a team that no longer exists in that form.
• Links. External pages that no longer exist.

The practical remedy: write time references so that they do not age. “Founded in 1998” does not age; “for over 25 years” does.

Three things that are easier to change before translating than afterwards:

• Short sentences. Convoluted German sentences get worse in every language.
• No idioms. “We won’t leave you out in the rain” is either wrong or odd in a translation.
• No text in images. Whatever is in the image is not translated along with the rest and would have to be rebuilt.

And the order: finish the German version first, then translate. Anyone working in parallel maintains every change twice and at some point forgets one.

Legal texts are not simply translated along with everything else: the legal notice (Impressum) and privacy notice must be correct in each version, not just understandable.

About what you explain on the phone three times a week. Every frequent question is a post, and you already have the answer in your head.

Four kinds that work reliably:

• “How can I tell whether …” — customers search for exactly this.
• “How much does … cost” — the most searched-for opening of all.
• A completed job. What the problem had been, what you did, what it looks like now. With pictures.
• What has changed — regulations, funding, deadlines. That makes you useful without advertising.

What does not work: “We were at the trade fair” and “Merry Christmas”. Nobody reads that who does not already know you.

Then do not write — answer questions. Take these five and answer in full sentences, the way you would tell someone:

1. What do you do?
2. For whom?
3. What is different about you compared with the competitor down the road?
4. What do customers ask you again and again?
5. What should someone do who decides on you?

The answers are the text. You only need to put them in order and shorten them.

If even that does not work: speak the five answers into your phone and type them up afterwards. Spoken language is almost always better than written — it has no clichés, because you do not need them when speaking.