You will restructure an existing page or post and compare the before and after with a reader.
Every business has a page that should work and does not. It gets visits, people scroll it, and almost nobody gets in touch. The owner usually blames the design or the price, when more often the copy has the right pieces in the wrong order, or is missing one of them entirely. This exercise takes one such page and rebuilds it with the four-part structure from lesson 4.1, then checks the result with a real reader.
Allow about 35 minutes, plus a short conversation with one person in your target group. You need your writing kit: the voice-of-customer file and the benefit and proof sheet.
Choose a page that gets visits but few enquiries, or a post that got views and little response. If you have website statistics, look for a page with steady traffic and a low number of enquiries or sign-ups from it. If you do not, choose the page you send people to most often, such as your services page or the link in your social media profile.
Copy the full text of the page into a document. This is your "before" version. Do not edit it yet.
Priya chose her "Our programmes" page. It was the second most visited page on her website and produced almost no trial bookings.
Read the "before" version and label each paragraph or section as problem, solution, proof, action, or none of these. Then ask three questions.
Which parts are missing? Many pages have no problem section at all. They start with the business and never show the reader their own situation.
Which parts are buried? A strong review three screens down, or a call to action only in the footer, counts as buried.
And which parts are out of order? Look for proof that appears before any claim, or a call to action that arrives before the reader knows what is on offer.
Priya's page opened with "Founded in 2016, our centre is committed to nurturing every child's love for mathematics" (none of these). It then listed four programmes with timings (solution, but features only). There was no problem section. Her best review was on a separate page. The only call to action was "Contact us" in the footer.
Now write the "after" version in four parts. Every line should come from your kit.
The problem takes one to three sentences from your voice-of-customer file. For the solution, use the top-ranked benefits from your benefit and proof sheet, each led by the benefit with the feature as the reason, as in lesson 3.1. Each piece of proof goes right after the claim it supports, and the page ends with one call to action that names the action, the result and one doubt removed, as you practised in lesson 4.3.
Keep the "after" version the same length as the "before" or shorter. If you add a problem section, cut something else. Most "before" pages have a paragraph about the company's history or values that the reader does not need, and that is usually the first thing to go.
Here is the top of Priya's "after" version.
"Knows the work at home, goes blank in the test. If that sounds like your child, our Saturday P5 and P6 classes are built for it. With six students in a class, the tutor checks every child's working as they go, so careless mistakes get caught in class, weeks before the exam. One parent told us: 'She finally stopped losing marks on the same kind of question.' Book a free Saturday trial lesson. One class, no payment, no commitment to a term."
The programme timings moved further down, under a heading for parents who want the detail. The founding story moved to the About page. The whole page came out about a hundred words shorter than before.
Find one person in your target group who has not seen either version. Show them the "before" and the "after", without saying which is which or which you prefer. Ask: which one makes you want to do something, and why?
Write down their answer in their words. If they choose the "before", that is useful too. Ask what it had that the "after" lacks. Sometimes a detail you cut was the one that mattered to this reader.
Priya's reader, a mother from the parent group she belonged to, picked the "after" and said "the first one is about the centre, the second one is about my kid". She also asked where the price was, which neither version showed. Priya added a line about the termly fee and how to see it.
You have two versions of the same page, side by side. In the "after" version each part is labelled problem, solution, proof or action. Underneath, you have the reader's choice and their reason, in their words, plus any change you made because of it. Publish the "after" version if you can, and note the date, so you can compare enquiries before and after.
When you choose your page, go for the one that matters most to your business rather than the easiest to fix, because the before and after you produce here will show you more than any score.
Produce a before and after version of one page with the four parts labelled, and write down the reader's preference and reason.
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