Most small business websites say nothing

Anyone can put up a good looking website now. AI will write the words for free in about a minute. So a pretty site is not proof of anything anymore. What still counts is the part only you could have written.

You have read these words a hundred times

"We are passionate about great experiences." "Quality you can trust." "Your vision, our know-how." Try a test. Cover your logo. Put a rival company's logo there instead. Did anything become untrue? If not, the page says nothing.

That used to be a writing problem. Now it is a business problem. Empty words cost nothing to make, so everyone has them. Sounding smooth is not a difference anymore. Being specific is.

Four things only you know

• Places you have really worked. Real hotels, real streets, real neighborhoods.
• Photos you took yourself. Not stock photos. Your gear, your crew, your customers.
• The real answer to what it costs. Give a price range. Say what makes it go up or down. That beats "call us for pricing."
• What you will not do. The jobs you turn down tell people who you are for.

How this looked for one company

We own a photo booth company called Coachella Party in Palm Desert, California. It works the Coachella Valley, Los Angeles, and Southern California. It also owned dozens of website names bought over the years. They sat unused and charged a renewal fee every year.

In one working day, 36 of those names became 36 separate websites. No redirects. No copies of each other. Each one got its own words for its own kind of customer. Each one pulled photos from the company's own library of 1,679 photos and 61 videos. Each got a request form. Every request lands in one customer list, and the form records which site it came from. Each got the padlock that shows a site is safe, plus a Google Search Console account.

Here is the part that matters. The Palm Desert page names JW Marriott Desert Springs, McCallum Theatre, and The Living Desert. The company has worked at all three. Palm Springs names Eight4Nine and Kimpton Rowan. San Diego names USS Midway Museum, Hotel del Coronado, and Snapdragon Stadium. Los Angeles names Terranea Resort and Hollywood Forever.

A photo booth company in another state cannot write those sentences. Neither can AI, unless someone hands it that history. Same with the brands on the list: lululemon, Smashbox, Mastercard, PacSun, RevenueCat, and Runna by Strava. You can see the whole thing at coachellaparty.com.

Find your version of this

Answer five questions about your own work. Write the answers down.

1. Name five real places where you have done the job.
2. Find five photos of your own work you have never put online.
3. Write the price question you get asked most. Answer it in plain numbers.
4. Name one job you say no to, and say why.
5. Write the one thing customers always say when the job is done.

Those answers are your website. The rest is filler.

What this does not do

Google takes weeks to notice new sites, not days. None of this promises sales or rankings. And more pages is not the goal. Google can tell when you made the same page 36 times with only the city name swapped. It ignores those pages, or worse. Those 36 sites only work because each one is truly different.

Do this today

Open your home page and read the first paragraph out loud. Cross out every sentence that would still be true for a rival company. Replace what is left with one real place, one real number, and one real photo you took. That is already a better website than most, and it took you an hour. We build this way for every company we run at air4.media.