What To Ask Clients When Scoping For Website Copy

You’ve landed a new client and are gearing up for the scoping call.

Asking the right questions is one of the most important parts of the web copywriting process.

While some clients provide great insight into their business others may give you little to work with. When this happens, having an arsenal of questions to extract the right information will make getting info out of those challenging clients a walk in the park.

In this blog post, we cover the most important questions to ask your clients when scoping for website content.

1. What Is The Business Name, Address/Service Area & Phone Number?

While this one is obvious, it’s easy to get wrong. Get the client to write out or spell the business name to ensure it’s correct. Ensure the business name, business location and phone number provided are consistent across all of the business's platforms, as this has an impact on the overall SEO results. 

2. What Services Do You Provide? 

Ask for a list of services from the business owner and work with them to prioritise the key services or the best-case leads they would like to be getting from the website. This will help you map out what pages to have on the website and if there are only limited pages available in the budget, which keywords/pages take priority. This will also give you an insight into the full scope of what the business offers.

3. What Is Your Unique Selling Point?

This often requires extensive probing as a lot of business owners will give you the same spiel about exceptional customer service, high-quality workmanship etc. While this is good information to include, try getting to the bottom of what truly makes the business unique - whether that's using locally sourced materials or products, having won industry-awards or offering quality guarantees. 

This information is vital for the home and about us pages and should convince a website visitor why the business is better than the competition. 

4. Tell Me About The Business

Get an in-depth rundown of why the business was started, how many years the business has been running, what problem the business is trying to solve, what locations the business services, who and how many people are involved etc. The more unique information you get about the business, the higher quality content you can produce for the home/about pages.

It always helps to include content about the business owner/employees to add a touch of personability to the website.

5. What Is The Process Of Delivering Each Service?

If you have limited experience with a specific industry or service, it’s crucial to ask the client how they deliver a service. What’s the step-by-step process from start to finish? This will give you enough information to write in-depth content for the service pages while ensuring the business owner sounds like the expert they are. 

The goal of the service pages is to explain to a potential customer what they can expect at every stage of the process when working with the business. 

Don’t be afraid to get the client to break everything down for you, even if it seems like an obvious service. At the end of the day, it’s better to ask more questions and smash the content out of the park than to be vague with your questioning and make mistakes in the content.

6. Do You Have Any Frequently Asked Questions?

Ask the client if they have any questions they are frequently asked by customers. This will give you additional insight into how to frame the service page content to answer those questions and also give you content for FAQ sections.

7. What Tone Of Voice Do You Like?

Ask the client if they have a preference for how they want their business to be represented online. Whether it’s professional or casual, getting a feel for how the client wants the content to sound is an important step in the scoping process.

You can also share some examples of previous work with the client to showcase the different tones of voice. This will ensure you are both on the same page in terms of the content style.

8. Is There Anything You Do Differently To Your Competition?

Another great question that can help frame the USPs. If the business operates slightly differently to its competition, that’s great information to include.

9. Is There Anything Else You Would Like To Include In The Content?

This is a great open-ended question that will give the business owner a chance to mention anything that hasn’t come up. You often get some good information from this question and it can be a great way to end the scoping call.

With these 9 questions, scoping for website copy will be a breeze and should only take 10-15 minutes. 

This will ensure you have everything you need to write engaging content that provides an in-depth overview of the business, their services and what makes them unique.