Every list of copywriting tips says the same five things: shorten your sentences, sharpen your call to action, cut the jargon, add urgency, tell a story. Do all five and your homepage can still fall flat. None of them were the starting point. What actually decides whether any of it works is how to describe your business simply, in words a stranger who’s never met you could follow on the first read.
Here’s what’s actually happening. You know your business the way you know your own kitchen in the dark. You can find anything without looking. So when you sit down to write about it, you write like you’re explaining it to a past client, someone who’s heard you talk about this a hundred times and nods along before you finish the sentence. A stranger landing on your site for the first time hasn’t heard any of it. She’s reading cold, and if the first line makes her work to understand what you actually do, she’s already gone.
Why five tweaks won’t fix a message that’s still fuzzy
Stronger calls to action, punchier headlines, a friendlier tone. These fixes assume the underlying message is solid and the delivery is the problem. Usually it’s the other way around.
Think about it like directions. You can say “turn left at the light” as clearly and confidently as you want. If it’s the wrong light, the confidence doesn’t help anyone find the place. A call to action can be short, punchy, and still pointing at a message nobody understood two sentences earlier.
This is why so many small business owners rewrite the same page over and over and it still doesn’t feel right. They’re polishing the phrasing on a sentence that was never doing its job in the first place. The sentence sounds fine. It just doesn’t tell a stranger anything she can use.
How to describe your business simply, in words a stranger would use
Simple doesn’t mean dumbed down. It means you’ve done the work of translating what you know into language someone outside your head can follow without effort. The Nielsen Norman Group, which studies how people actually read and use websites, recommends writing at roughly a grade 6 to 8 reading level for general audiences and makes a point worth sitting with: no one has ever complained that a piece of writing was too easy to understand. Clarity doesn’t insult smart readers. It just respects that they’re busy.
A quick way to test your own homepage: read your first line out loud to someone outside your industry, someone who has no idea what you do for work. Ask her to repeat back what your business does. If she hesitates, or paraphrases it into something vaguer than what you actually offer, you’ve found the problem. It isn’t a tone problem or a font problem. It’s a clarity problem, sitting right in the sentence you thought was already doing its job.
I’ll admit this one’s hard to catch on your own, because your brain fills in the blanks automatically. You already know what you meant. Everyone else is stuck with what you actually wrote.
The curse of knowledge is why your homepage sounds fine to you
There’s a name for this. It’s called the curse of knowledge, and it means once you know something well, you can’t easily imagine what it’s like not to know it. You read your own about page and every gap gets filled in automatically, because your brain already has the missing pieces. A stranger reading the same page just has the words on the screen. Nothing gets filled in for her.
The U.S. federal government runs into this same problem constantly, which is part of why it built formal plain language standards in the first place. Its plain language guidance puts it plainly: write for your specific audience so they actually understand it, not for people who already know the subject. A government agency landed on the same lesson a small business owner needs. Knowing your subject well is exactly what makes you bad at explaining it simply, until you catch yourself doing it.
Once you can name the curse of knowledge, you start seeing it everywhere in your own writing. The service description that lists features instead of naming what the client actually gets. The bio that walks through your credentials before it says who you help. Both downstream of the same habit, writing for someone who already gets it.
What changes once you write for the stranger, not the insider
This is where the five tweaks finally earn their keep, but only after the message underneath them is clear. A stronger call to action works when the sentence above it already made sense. A shorter headline works when it’s still saying something specific. The tweaks were never wrong. They just can’t fix a message that hasn’t been translated yet.
So the order matters. Get the plain, one-sentence version of what you do and who it’s for nailed down first, in words your mother-in-law could repeat back correctly. Then tighten the phrasing and the call to action after that. Skip the first step and you’re just rearranging furniture in a room nobody can find.
You don’t have to overhaul your entire site to test this. Start with the first line a stranger sees, usually your homepage headline, and read it against the test above. If it fails, that’s your actual starting point, not the fifth tweak on somebody’s listicle.
Related reading: If you want a longer look at what clear messaging actually sounds like once it’s translated for a stranger, read What Does Clear Business Messaging Actually Sound Like?
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it actually mean to describe your business simply?
It means naming the problem you solve and who you solve it for, in plain language a stranger could repeat back correctly an hour later. That’s writing for someone outside your business who has no context, not shaving words off for their own sake.
How do I know if my business description is too complicated?
Read it out loud to someone who has never heard you talk about your business. Ask her what you do. If she hesitates, guesses vaguely, or needs you to explain further, the description hasn’t done its job yet.
Why does simple messaging outperform clever messaging?
Clever asks the reader to work for the meaning. A stranger scrolling past your site isn’t going to do that work. She’ll move on before she figures out what you’re getting at. Simple gets understood in the time she’s already willing to give you.
Do I need to rewrite my whole website to fix this?
No. Start with the one line a stranger sees first, usually your homepage headline or your bio’s opening sentence. Get that translated into plain language before you touch anything else. Everything downstream gets easier once that line is doing its job.
Is this the same thing as dumbing down my message?
No. Plain language respects the reader’s time instead of testing her patience for decoding jargon. Smart readers prefer it too. Nobody has ever put a page down because it was too easy to follow.
If you want a faster read on where your own site loses a stranger, Post Road’s website clarity tool walks you through it in a few minutes, no rewrite required yet. For a deeper look at why the rewrites haven’t stuck, read You’ve Rewritten This 100 Times. The Problem’s Not You.