Here's the about page nearly every small business has. It opens with a founding story nobody asked for, moves into a paragraph about passion and commitment to excellence, lists three or four values — integrity, innovation, quality — and closes with something about building lasting partnerships. It's warm, it's professional, and it's completely interchangeable with every competitor's about page, because you could swap the company name and nobody would notice. The page exists, it took an afternoon to write, and it does almost nothing.
What makes this a particularly expensive failure is that the about page is one of the most-visited pages on most small business websites. People genuinely go looking for it — usually at a specific moment, when they're fairly interested and want to know who they'd actually be dealing with before making contact. That's a high-intent visitor arriving at exactly the point where trust gets built or lost, and most businesses greet them with generic language that answers none of the questions that brought them there.
Because the visitor isn't reading your about page to learn your history or admire your values. They're checking whether you're real, whether you're competent, and whether you're someone they'd want to work with. Those are the questions, and the standard about page answers precisely none of them — a founding story doesn't establish competence, a values list doesn't establish anything at all, and neither tells the visitor who they'd actually be talking to. The page is called "about us," and the visitor is really asking "can I trust you," which is a different question.
The fix is straightforward and mostly involves being specific and human where the convention is to be vague and corporate. Say who you actually are, what you actually do and for whom, show evidence rather than adjectives, and let a real person come through. None of it requires writing talent — it requires being willing to say something particular instead of something safe. Here's how to write an about page that does the job.
Key Takeaways
- Visitors come to check if you're trustworthy. They're not reading your history — they're deciding whether you're real, competent, and someone they'd want to deal with.
- Values lists say nothing. Every business claims integrity and quality. Claims anyone could make carry no information and are ignored accordingly.
- Show the humans. People want to know who they'd actually work with. Real names, real faces, and a real voice do more for trust than any amount of polished copy.
- Be specific about what you do and for whom. "We help businesses grow" tells a visitor nothing. Naming the work and the client type tells them whether they're in the right place.
- Evidence beats adjectives. Concrete work, results, and credentials establish competence. Describing yourself as experienced and passionate does not.
Know Why People Are Actually There
Start with the visitor's purpose, because it explains every fix that follows. Someone lands on your about page at a specific moment: they've encountered your work, your service, or your pitch, they're interested enough to keep looking, and now they want to know who's behind it before they commit to contacting you. It's a checking behavior — a last verification step before the risk of getting in touch.
What they're checking is narrow and consistent. Are these people real, or is this a shell with stock photos? Do they seem competent at the specific thing I need? Are they the kind of people I'd want to deal with — professional, straightforward, someone I could work with for months? And, often, are they the right size and type for me, since a solo operator and a fifty-person agency are different propositions and a visitor is trying to work out which they're looking at.
Notice that none of these questions are answered by a founding narrative or a values list. A visitor asking "are these people competent" gets nothing from "we're passionate about excellence," because every business says that and saying it costs nothing. The generic about page fails not because it's badly written but because it addresses a different assignment than the one the visitor brought — and once you understand what they actually came for, writing a page that answers it becomes mostly a matter of substitution: evidence where the claims were, specifics where the generalities were, people where the corporate voice was.
Cut the Values and the Origin Story
Two conventions dominate about pages and neither earns its space. The first is the values list — integrity, innovation, excellence, collaboration — which is worth cutting entirely in most cases. The problem isn't that values are unimportant; it's that stated values carry no information, because no business claims the opposite. Nobody advertises indifference or shoddy work, so listing the positive version distinguishes you from nothing and reads as filler. Values that genuinely matter show up in how you describe your work and how you behave, not in a list of abstract nouns.
The second convention is the founding story, which is more defensible but usually misused. A visitor generally doesn't care that the company was founded in a spare room out of a frustration with the industry — that's a story you find meaningful because you lived it, and its relevance to their decision is close to zero. Where origin material does work is when it directly explains something useful about you now: why you specialize in this particular thing, what experience shaped how you work, why you approach the problem differently. That's not a story for its own sake; it's evidence delivered narratively.
The general principle is that anything a competitor could copy onto their own page without editing is doing no work for you. This is the same emptiness that makes so many agency websites forgettable — language chosen because it's safe rather than because it says anything, which succeeds at avoiding risk and fails at communicating. [BACKLINK PLACEHOLDER → suggestion: internal link to article #20, why most agency websites are forgettable on purpose / safe language that says nothing] Run that test over your existing about page and you'll usually find most of it disappears, which is a good outcome — what remains is the part that was actually yours.
Show the People
The single strongest element on most about pages is the people, and it's routinely missing or hidden. Visitors want to know who they'd actually be dealing with, and real names, real photographs, and a sense of individual personality do more for trust than any amount of well-crafted copy — because a business that shows its people is transparent in a way that a faceless corporate voice isn't, and transparency is most of what a checking visitor is looking for.
The absence is conspicuous in the other direction. A site that talks about "our team" without ever showing one, or uses obvious stock imagery of people who don't work there, quietly raises exactly the question the visitor came to resolve. Anonymity reads as either very large (which small businesses aren't) or as something being concealed. If you're a solo operator, say so plainly — many clients specifically prefer working directly with one person, and pretending to be a bigger entity is both fragile and unnecessary.
Let a real voice come through in the writing, too. Corporate-neutral prose is the default because it feels professional and safe, and it actively works against you here, since the page's purpose is to convey what you're like to deal with. Writing the way you'd actually speak — direct, human, specific — does more for the page than polish does, and it's the same principle that separates communication people respond to from communication they skim past. [BACKLINK PLACEHOLDER → suggestion: internal link to article #66, how to write an email newsletter people actually read / sounding like a person rather than a company] The visitor is trying to imagine working with you. Give them something human to imagine.
Be Specific and Show Evidence
Replace claims with particulars, throughout. "We help businesses grow" applies to virtually every company in existence and therefore tells a visitor nothing; naming what you actually do and who you do it for tells them immediately whether they're in the right place. Specificity does double work here: it communicates competence, since only someone who really does this could describe it precisely, and it filters, since a visitor who isn't your client type can leave quickly rather than wasting both your time.
Then establish competence with evidence rather than adjectives. Describing yourself as experienced, skilled, and results-driven is a set of claims a visitor has no reason to accept; showing specific work, naming client types you've served, citing concrete outcomes, or pointing to relevant credentials gives them something to actually evaluate. Even brief evidence outperforms extensive self-description, because evidence can be checked and adjectives can't. Link to your work rather than describing your qualities, and the page starts doing something. [BACKLINK PLACEHOLDER → suggestion: internal link to article #89, what to put in your portfolio / evidence and context over self-description]
The about page is also a natural home for the practical facts a checking visitor wants and often can't find: where you're based, roughly how big you are, how you work, who you typically work with. These feel mundane and they're frequently the specific things someone is trying to determine, particularly when deciding whether you're a plausible fit. Answering them plainly removes friction at exactly the moment the visitor is deciding whether to make contact.
🎬 Embed a short before-and-after of a values-and-mission about page rewritten with real people, specific work, and concrete evidence.
Structure It and Point Somewhere
A workable structure is simple: lead with a clear, plain statement of what you do and who you do it for, so the visitor immediately knows they're in the right place. Then introduce the people, with names, faces, and enough personality to be human. Then provide evidence — the work, the results, the relevant background that establishes you can actually do this. Then the practical details someone needs to assess fit. Then a clear next step.
That last part matters and is frequently forgotten. Someone reading your about page carefully is often close to making contact, which makes it one of the higher-intent pages on your site — and a page that ends with nothing for them to do wastes that. A single clear action, framed around what they'd get rather than a generic "contact us," converts an interested reader into an enquiry. [BACKLINK PLACEHOLDER → suggestion: internal link to article #50, why nobody acts on your call to action / one clear, specific ask]
Keep it as short as it can be while doing the job. Long about pages are usually long because they're padded with narrative and claims rather than because they contain more evidence, and a visitor who is checking rather than reading will scan regardless. Cut anything that isn't answering one of the questions they arrived with — which, on most existing about pages, is a substantial proportion of the words.
