The About Page Nobody Reads and Why It Matters

Low traffic, high intent

The about page usually sits well down the list of most-visited pages, which leads businesses to conclude it does not matter.

The people who visit it are not browsing. They have decided they might use you and are checking whether that feels safe.

Somebody about to let a stranger into their house, or hand over a deposit, is doing a quick sanity check. This is the page they check.

Which makes it low volume and high consequence, and worth an hour despite the traffic figures.

What people are actually checking

• Is this a real business or a page somebody made last week.
• Is there an actual person behind it.
• How long have they been doing this.
• Are they local, or a national operation using a local number.
• Do they seem competent and reasonable to deal with.
• Would I be able to find them if something went wrong.

The last is unstated and important. Accountability is what people are looking for, and a business that is hard to identify reads as a business that would be hard to hold responsible.

What most about pages contain instead

A paragraph in the third person about a commitment to excellence, a mission statement, and a stock photograph of people in a meeting.

None of that answers any of the six questions. It is written in the register of a larger company, by a small business trying to sound larger.

The irony is that sounding larger is the opposite of what helps. The advantage a small business has is that a person is accountable, and hiding that discards it.

A worked example

A two-person renovation business whose about page ran to four paragraphs about quality craftsmanship and customer focus, with no names and a stock image.

The replacement was shorter. Two names, two photographs taken on a phone in a workshop, how long each had been doing the trade, what they had done before, the town they both lived in, and one line about why they started the business.

It also said plainly what they did not do, which was anything involving structural work.

The page went from being the least useful on the site to being the second most common page people mentioned on the phone. Several enquiries opened with a comment about one of the photographs.

Nothing about the business changed. It had simply stopped being anonymous.

What to include

In rough order of usefulness.

Who runs the business, by name, with a photograph that looks like them rather than a portrait session. How long you have been doing the work, and what you did before if it is relevant.

Where you are based, specifically. Any qualifications, licences or memberships, with numbers where they exist.

What you actually do and, usefully, what you do not. And a sentence about why you do it this way, if there is an honest one.

Photographs matter here

More than on most pages, and they are the item businesses resist most.

A photograph of the actual person is the single strongest trust signal on the page. It does not need to be professional; it needs to be real and recognisable.

A phone photograph in work clothes, in the workshop or on a site, outperforms a studio portrait for a trade. It matches what the customer will actually meet.

Stock photography does the opposite. Once somebody suspects the people pictured do not work there, everything else on the page is discounted.

The counter-case

Where less is genuinely better.

A business with legitimate safety or privacy reasons for not publishing a face. Somebody working from home who does not want to be identified locally. A business in a sensitive trade where clients value discretion.

Those are real, and the answer is not stock photography. It is the other trust signals used harder: the licence numbers, the years, the association memberships, the address of the premises, and a name even without a face.

Anonymous is a cost. Sometimes it is a cost worth paying, and it should be paid deliberately rather than by default.

Length and tone

Shorter than instinct suggests, and in the first person.

Three hundred words is usually plenty. The page is a check rather than a read, and somebody scanning for reassurance does not want a company history.

Write it as I or we rather than in the third person. A two-person business referring to itself as an organisation reads as a business pretending to be something else.

And avoid the mission statement. Nobody has ever hired a trade because of one.

What to leave out

Values lists, which everybody claims and nobody differentiates on. Mission statements. Stock photography of any kind.

Vague claims about being the leading provider of anything, which invite the question of according to whom.

And long histories of the industry, which appear surprisingly often and interest nobody except the person who wrote them.

The team question

For a business with staff, a decision worth making deliberately.

Listing everybody is appropriate for a practice where customers deal with different people. It is unnecessary for a trade where the owner attends every job.

What matters more than completeness is that whoever the customer will actually meet appears somewhere. A page featuring the owner, when a different crew turns up, has set an expectation it does not meet.

If the team changes often, either keep it current or keep it general. A page listing three people who left is worse than one that never named them.

For most small businesses the honest version is the owner plus a line saying how many people work there, which is accurate and does not need updating every time somebody moves on.

Where it links to

Somebody reaching the end of this page is close to deciding.

So the page should end with the contact route rather than trailing off. Not a hard sell, just the obvious next step made easy.

And links to examples of the work, since the natural follow-up question after deciding you seem legitimate is wanting to see what you produce.

How the rest of a page holds a stranger's attention is covered in writing the page somebody landed on.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.