The About page: your second most visited page, usually wasted
On most small business sites the About page is the second or third most visited page after the homepage, and it is almost always the least considered. It typically contains three sentences about being founded in a certain year and a commitment to quality. That page is doing nothing, and the traffic arriving on it is people deciding whether to trust you with their money.
Why that page gets so much traffic
People do not read About pages out of curiosity. They read them at a specific moment: after they have seen your service and price, and before they contact you.
That moment is a risk check. The visitor is asking whether you are a real business, whether you will still exist in a year, and whether they will be dealing with a competent person or a call centre.
This is especially true for higher value services where the buyer cannot judge the quality of the work in advance. The less someone can evaluate the product, the more weight they put on evaluating the provider.
It matters more for smaller companies, not less. A large brand carries its own credibility, while an unknown company has to build it on the page.
So the practical framing is simple. The About page is not a history section. It is the page that closes the trust gap before someone fills in a form.
What visitors are actually looking for
Four questions come up again and again, and a good About page answers all of them without being asked.
- Who are the people behind this? Names and faces, not a stock photo of a team high fiving in a bright office.
- Have you done this before, for someone like me? Concrete work, specific clients, real numbers.
- Are you a legitimate business? Company name, registration details, a physical location, real contact channels.
- What is it like to work with you? Process, response times, how you handle problems.
Notice that none of these questions is about your founding year or your passion for excellence. Those are the two things most About pages lead with.
A structure that works
Open with what you do and for whom, in one plain sentence. Someone arriving from a search result may not have seen your homepage, so orient them immediately.
Follow with the specific: how long you have been doing this, how many projects, in which industries. Numbers are credibility because they can be checked and vague adjectives cannot.
Introduce the people. A real photograph and a first name outperform a polished paragraph about company values by a wide margin, and for a small team this is the single highest impact element on the page.
Explain how you work. A short description of what happens after someone gets in touch removes the most common hesitation, which is not price but uncertainty about the process.
Add proof: client logos, a short case reference, a review with a full name, a certification that is genuinely relevant. Two specific proofs beat ten generic badges.
Close with a next step and real contact details. An About page that ends without a way forward sends the reader back to the menu to find one, and some of them do not bother.
Mistakes that quietly destroy trust
Writing about yourself in the corporate third person when you are three people. Readers can tell, and the mismatch reads as pretending to be bigger than you are.
Stock photography of people who do not work at your company. It is recognised more often than site owners expect, and once a visitor spots one staged photo they start doubting the rest of the page.
Claims with no substance. Leading provider, innovative approach and customer focused appear on nearly every site and therefore carry no information at all.
No names, no address, no company registration. For a European business this is easy to include and its absence is noticed by exactly the cautious buyers you want.
A page that has not been touched in five years. An About page mentioning a team member who left in 2021 or a milestone from a decade ago signals that nobody is minding the site.
The About page and search
The About page rarely ranks for commercial keywords and it should not be optimised as if it did. Its search value is indirect but real.
It is the strongest page on your site for expertise and trust signals, which matter for how the whole domain is assessed, particularly in fields where advice can affect someone's money or health.
It is also the page most often cited when someone writes about your company, so make the facts easy to copy: exact company name, location, founding year, what you do.
Add Organisation structured data with your name, logo, address and contact details. It helps search engines connect your site to your business listing and social profiles.
Link from the About page to your main service pages using real descriptive text. This page attracts internal and external links, and passing that value on to the pages that earn money is free.
Finally, give it a real title tag. About us tells nobody anything, while About plus your company name plus what you do earns clicks from branded searches, which are the searches most likely to convert.
FAQ
How long should an About page be?+
Between four hundred and eight hundred words suits most small businesses, which is roughly a screen and a half of reading. The length matters far less than the specificity, because a short page full of concrete facts outperforms a long page of adjectives every time. If you find yourself padding to reach a word count, stop writing and add proof instead.
Should I include photos of the team?+
Yes, and real photographs rather than stock images, because a genuine picture of the person a client will actually deal with is one of the strongest trust signals available to a small company. They do not need to be studio quality, and consistency of style matters more than production value. If someone on the team prefers not to appear, use the people who are comfortable and keep the page honest rather than empty.
Does the About page help SEO?+
Not usually through direct rankings, since almost nobody searches for the phrase about us, but it contributes in other ways. It is where expertise and legitimacy signals live, it is the natural home for Organisation structured data, and it tends to accumulate links from partners, directories and press. Treat it as a trust and conversion page that supports search rather than a page that competes for traffic on its own.