The question our viewer brought up
In the latter stages of the stream, a viewer presented Nathan Ingram, the host and agency trainer here at hosting.com, with an interesting question. Here’s what they said:
I advised a new client, a counselor, that the one-page site could benefit from additional pages. She said she'd come up with more pages. I've received a portion of it, it's basically an encyclopedia on anxiety. How do you tell a client that pure AI-generated copy, or text scraped from other sites, has little value and doesn't resonate with search engines or with new clients? I'm trying to direct her to personally slant things. Any suggestions? My goal is to have a services page about the methods she uses for issues people experience, and how counseling helps.
To put it shortly, the agency owner wanted more pages and instead got dense, clinical copy that one might expect in a textbook. Sure, it’s thorough and well-researched, but it’s aimed at the wrong audience entirely.
It’s not difficult to imagine a potential client going to the counselor’s website, seeing the wall of text, and backing out without even learning about the counselor’s services. It’s not the counselor’s fault, though. It’s an easy trap to fall into. They are an expert on the subject matter, so naturally they wanted to share their depth of knowledge with their visitors.
However, assuming that the depth is why people visit the website is the misstep that sparked this whole situation.
Determining the purpose of the website
Before we even begin evaluating if a piece of content is good, it’s important to ask a much simpler question: what job does it need to do? Every page on a website exists along the user experience journey.
For most service-oriented businesses, the journey starts with a visitor’s need to know you and your services, then like you enough to build trust, and ends with them believing you can help. At that point they typically use your services.
The content you create for your website should be judged against that journey. It doesn’t matter how complete and accurate it is on its own terms. An encyclopedia entry on anxiety is excellent writing on its own and something the writer should be proud of. However, if it doesn’t move the reader along the journey towards using your services, it’s not the correct type of content.
As Nathan himself puts it:
Most human beings don't want to read a Wikipedia article on all the things the DSM-5 says about anxiety.
And that’s an important distinction to make. Most people are looking for specific information within the topic itself, not all the information at once. That reframes the whole conversation. It’s not “your content isn’t good.” It’s “this content answers a different question than the one your visitors are asking.”
People hire trust, not tutorials
There’s one major underlying principle under all of this: most people don’t hire someone because they’ve been taught how the job gets done. Most people hire someone because they trust them to do the job.
This instinct to overexplain is not something that occurs only in counseling either. A contractor explaining their exact renovation methodology, or a lawyer walking a client through case law before discussing their situation, runs into the same wall. Visitors don’t want a tutorial; they want confidence someone can handle their task.
One of the worst things about overexplaining is that the instinct comes from a genuinely good place, it’s just misapplied here. Nathan explains it bluntly but correctly:
Your client doesn't need to be educated about how you do things, they need to know that you can do things. If they wanted to learn how to do things and do it themselves, they wouldn't hire you.
That’s why explanations have a place on a website, but not on the pages that aim to convert people into clients.
What good content looks like
Once the goal shifts from “explain the subject” to “build trust,” the shape of “right content” becomes much clearer.
Let’s take our viewer’s client and their counseling site. Here’s what that could look like in practice:
Notice how none of this requires the counselor to abandon their expertise. Instead, that expertise shows up as reassurance and not a dry, off-putting lecture.
And while the example was for our viewer’s specific case, you can use the general advice for any website: create content that helps, builds trust, and doesn’t overburden the reader with unnecessary facts.
Where AI can help
As you can imagine, there’s been a workflow shift with the improvements AI has gone through. It’s worth bringing up here, because it changes how this conversation between an agency and a client should go.
For the longest time, the standard model was that the client provides the content and agencies shape it. That model has been getting increasingly out of date, and not because clients are getting worse at writing content.
We are sure anyone who has had to write content from scratch can empathize here: staring at a blank page with just a few broad questions as your guide is not fun. That’s where AI can help and Nathan himself is excited to move away from doing things like this:
We are way past the days of giving a client an outline and telling them what they need to write. Thank God, that was the worst part of web creation.
He’s not wrong. For many people, learning and doing something is easy, but having to describe it in a way that’s not clinical can be a huge hurdle. Let’s take the counselor for example again. Counseling keeps them busy every day, and none of it involves writing.
So, let’s flip things around. AI content tools can generate a solid starting point in a voice that resonates with the client. All that’s necessary is a brief conversation with them about who they are and what they do. Then, the draft goes to the client instead of the client providing the draft.
That’s the core of what’s changed: clients are consistently better at reacting and adjusting a draft, rather than writing it on their own.
The key takeaway
Ultimately, whether content is “good” depends on the job it does both for the page it’s on and in the visitor’s journey. If you don’t have a clear answer, it’s worth reevaluating the content you have, regardless of how well-written it is.
One of the worst things you can do to a piece of content is to use it in the wrong way. It’s time and effort that are going to waste, because the purpose is misguided. So, ask yourself “What do I want this content to do?” and start from there. Reassure, don’t just lecture.
Finally, if you’d like to learn more about how Nathan handles content in his agency or have any other questions regarding hosting, WordPress, or AI, join us for Office Hours. It’s every Thursday at 2 p.m. EST, where you can get answers live.
FAQ
Should an agency ever push back on content a client is proud of and excited about?
Yes, though it's worth doing carefully. A client's enthusiasm for content they've written is a good sign of engagement, and it's better to redirect that energy toward the right kind of content than to dampen it. Framing the conversation around the page's purpose, rather than the quality of the writing, keeps the client feeling collaborative instead of criticized.
How do you know if a page is too technical for its intended audience?
A useful test is to imagine a visitor reading the page while trying to decide whether to book an appointment or make a purchase. If the content requires them to already understand specialized terminology, or reads more like reference material than a conversation, it's likely written for peers in the field rather than for the people the business actually serves.
Is client-written content ever usable as-is, without reshaping it?
Occasionally, especially when a client has a strong natural voice and understands their audience well. More often, client-written content contains good raw material, real insight, authentic language, genuine expertise, that simply needs to be reorganized around the visitor's journey rather than around the client's own train of thought.
How much background knowledge should a services page assume the visitor already has?
Generally, very little. Most visitors arrive at a services page because they're experiencing a problem, not because they've studied it. Content that leads with the problem as the visitor would describe it, rather than the clinical or technical framing an expert would use, tends to connect faster and build trust more efficiently.