Truthfully, too many About pages on websites are a snooze.
I believe small businesses/entrepreneurs may misunderstand the intention of the About page, and in doing so completely miss out on the strategy that should be implementing and the results they could be receiving.
There are so many reasons the About page on your website is important and shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought. In fact, if done correctly, it’s right up there with your Home page and Services page for getting readers to convert to YES for whatever it is that you’re selling.
Not convinced yet? Well for starters, if someone is on your About page, they’re curious about you and your business. They are on your About page purposefully. How do I know this to be true? Because they had to click to get there, probably from your Home page or another landing page.
They chose to click About instead of bouncing back to Google search and looking for someone or something else. They read your Home page and delved deeper into your site. So don’t blow it by boring them to death!
In fact, I’m going to give you 7 reasons why the About page is going to help convert your website visitors from browsers to buyers!
FIRST, YOUR ABOUT PAGE IS NOT A RESUME.
No one loves to read a resume. Well, not the majority of people. God bless the people who read resumes for a living, the world needs your service.
A resume is a very systematic and formatted way to get automated resume readers (aka …not human) to spot keywords in your work history and toss your resume into the pile that does get read by humans.
Resumes are very factual and historic, but rarely read like a captivating story.
Yes, your About page is going to highlight you, and it should. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. But did you know that your About page should also include your reader? Invite the reader into your story. Bring up some of their feelings, yearnings and frustrations, and identify with them.
For instance, doesn’t trying to write your About page make you cringe? You may not like talking about yourself and your accomplishments, humble you. Or it feels like you’re back in school and have a report due, ugh. Or maybe you fear you’ll sound like a pompous jerk tooting your own horn and you don’t want to be that guy. I know, I felt like that once too. (See what I did there? …wink, wink).
The point is, you do know their hopes, dreams, expectations, frustrations and desired transformations they seek…because you built a business around solving it! Even if your product or service is perceived as a luxury item, you can speak authentically and passionately about it. Authenticity and passion are key while you write about the benefits to your reader, and not just the features, of whatever it is you offer in your business.
Write about how whatever it is that you do or sell will save them money, save them time, has quality, is custom, makes life easier, solves their problem or will make them feel better.
Identify what feeling and transformation you want to convey and weave that into your About page.
Now there is a dance of sharing here, because you do want to show them you, the person behind the business, so don’t stay hidden. But the most captivating of stories draws the reader in, so keep that in mind as you write. Make your About page about them.
THE ABOUT PAGE STARTS ESTABLISHING TRUST
TRUST is the biggest reason to have an About page in the first place. We’re talking internet here, and the reader wants to know you really exist beyond the online world and aren’t a fly by night operation seeking to grab their credit card information and sell it on the dark web…yep, people think that, I saw the commercial.
I hate it when I go to an About page and there’s a stock photo from a decade ago (or none at all!) and there’s only two bland and generic sentences about “the company” in a dry text book sort of way. No mention of a human or team or pictures of the people who run the business or work there? I’m out. Bounce.
I also bounce if there’s no email address, phone number, address, or name of any individual who works there somewhere on the website. Ok, this isn’t legit, that’s what I think. I don’t have to have ALL those details, but there better be something. I’ve ordered a few times too many a cute piece of clothing from China that never arrived because I didn’t check out a website further.
Ways to establish trust on your website:
- Put pictures of the owner, the managers, and/or the team who works there.
- Put where you’re You don’t have to put an address if you’re an online service entrepreneur without a brick and mortar (like myself), but do tell geographically where you are.
- Put how someone can contact your business (though this doesn’t have to be on your About page. You can put your contact info in the footer so it’s on every page, and definitely put it on your Contact page.)
- Use a business email address and not a personal email address. (@ gmail, @outlook, @yahoo…these are all personal @yourdomainname.com is a business email address, and is more trustworthy.
- Have testimonials/reviews on your website to establish social proof.