The order most teams use produces bad pages
Most teams start with the headline, then write subhead, then write the rest. This is backwards. The headline is a compression of the rest of the page — until you know what's in the body, you don't know what to compress. Pages written headline-first usually end up either too vague (because the writer hasn't decided what specifically matters yet) or feature-dump (because the writer used the brand-approved positioning instead of the customer's actual problem).
The pain-outcome-proof-objection skeleton
Before writing any copy, fill in four sentences. Pain: what the visitor was Googling 30 seconds before landing here? "I'm spending 4 hours a week on QuickBooks reconciliation and getting it wrong half the time." Outcome: what specifically changes? "Reconcile a month of transactions in 12 minutes with 99.4% accuracy." Proof: who says this is real? "Used by Acme, Stripe, and 1,200 other accounting teams. 4.8/5 on G2." Objection: what's the reason not to buy, and how do you handle it? "Most reconciliation tools require a migration. We connect to QuickBooks read-only — no data leaves your system." Now write the headline.
The voice test
Read your draft out loud. If you sound like a brand telling people about itself, rewrite. If you sound like a senior practitioner explaining a solution to a peer, you're close. Across our copy analysis, the single biggest gap between top-quartile and median pages is voice — top pages sound like they were written by an expert, not a marketing department. Run your draft through our copy analyzer for a calibration score.