About Page Content and What Actually Belongs on It
About page content is where an unknown business proves who does the work. See what belongs on the page, in what order, and what to cut.
By David Jubé · Aug 16, 2026 · 14 min read
The About page is the one a reader opens after half deciding to buy from you, and on a site nobody has heard of it is the only place the business says who is behind the work. It usually gets written last, in about ten minutes, in third person, once the service pages are finished and the energy has gone.
Then it sits there as a formality while the reader who opened it goes looking for a reason to withdraw the provisional yes they arrived with. They want four things, and a page written in ten minutes carries none of them: who does the work, how long that person has done it, what the work actually is, and what they turn away.
Key takeaways
- About page content is an entity record before it is a story, because a reader and a crawler both arrive holding no prior information about you and this is the page that supplies it.
- Four things have to be established, and they are read in a fixed order: who does the work, what that person did before, what the work actually is, and what you turn away.
- First person is the correct voice for a one-person business, because third person removes the exact signal the page exists to carry.
- Experience is provable before you have a client list, using counts you can stand behind and vertical descriptions that name nobody.
- Anything a stranger cannot check is taking space from something they can, which is why the cut list follows the same order as the keep list.
- Organization markup labels those four facts for a machine, and it belongs on this page rather than anywhere else on the site.
The About Page Is an Entity Record Before It Is a Story
About page content is the record of an entity: a named business, run by named people, doing described work, for a stated length of time, within stated limits. A brand story is judged on whether it reads well. A record is judged on whether a stranger can describe you accurately once they have finished reading, which is the harder test and the only one that counts when nobody has heard of you.
Google’s rater guidelines on information about the creator direct raters to establish who is responsible for a site and its content, and Moz’s guidance on trust signals covers the same ground. A person deciding whether to trust you and a system deciding how to describe you both go looking for the same short list of facts.
Experience shows up across a whole site in a hundred small ways, and Writing for E-E-A-T: Prove Experience on the Page sets those out. The About page concentrates them into one place, which is why it is worth more to a business with no reputation yet than to an established one. Nothing else on a new site is doing that job.
Readers Arrive Half-Sold and Spend Under a Minute Deciding to Continue
Nobody opens an About page cold. They arrive from a service page holding a provisional yes and looking for a reason to withdraw it, which makes the page a check to survive rather than a pitch to win. NN/g’s research on About Us pages found people hunt for a plain statement of what an organisation does and who is behind it, and abandon pages that answer neither. Pew’s survey data on trust in businesses records the broad public scepticism toward business leaders that the hunting sits on top of.
The same reader is checking you somewhere else at the same time. BrightLocal’s consumer survey on reviews and trust found Google has climbed back to being the dominant place people read reviews, so there is usually a second window open beside yours. You cannot write anything into that window. You can decide what the reader finds in this one, and the order they find it in.
Rank the Page by What Gets Checked First, Not by What Reads Best
Four things have to be established, and readers look for them in a consistent order.
Who does the work, by name
Open with the people accountable for the output, named, with a real photograph. A reader who cannot find a human on an About page assumes there is a reason, and the assumption is never generous.
History, method and boundaries all belong to somebody. Anonymous versions of those three read as claims rather than facts, so the three items below depend on this one having been done first.
How long you have done it, and what you did before
State the tenure and the prior work in one breath. Six years doing this, eleven before that in an adjacent role, is a sentence a stranger can weigh, and a founding anecdote is not.
Prior experience is the strongest asset a new business owns, for the plain reason that the business is new and the person running it is not. Spending it on the page costs you nothing and it is not available anywhere else.
What the work actually is, in the reader’s words
Describe the work as a buyer would describe it to a colleague. A description nobody can repeat back does not travel, and travelling is the whole point of a sentence somebody reads once and then quotes to a business partner. Method detail belongs on the service page, where the reader has already decided you are worth reading closely, and Service Page Content Examples: Six Sections in Order sets out the order those sections go in.
What you turn away, and why
Name the work you decline. A boundary is the credibility statement a competitor’s page rarely carries, because publishing it costs something and therefore reads as true.
It also qualifies the reader. Somebody who leaves after reading what you do not do was never going to buy, and finding that out on the page is cheaper for both of you than finding it out on a call.
The same order decides what comes off the page. Anything a stranger cannot check is competing for space with something they can, and the About page usually opens with the material that loses that contest.
First Person Costs You Nothing and Third Person Costs You the Signal
Voice is a fact about the business rather than a style question, so write in the voice that matches who does the work. A one-person business written in third person invents an organisation the reader finds no evidence of anywhere else on the site, and a reader who notices the gap reads it as concealment rather than modesty.
Getting the voice right at the level of the paragraph is a separate habit from getting it right at the level of the page, and The AI Tells That Cost You Readers, Not Rankings covers the specific tics that undo a first-person page faster than any structural mistake does.
The repeat-back test
Ask somebody outside your business to describe you from memory after reading the page. If they can name who does the work, how long you have done it and one thing you decline, the record holds. If they can only say how it felt, it is still a brand story.
Experience Is Provable Before You Have a Client List
Publish counts you can stand behind and descriptions that name nobody. Both work from your first week of trading and neither needs a client to agree to anything.
Proof only functions if the reader believes it, and two of the standard proof devices do not clear that bar. Unbounce on why testimonials fail to convince reports a study in which peer testimonials produced no switching effect, and Baymard’s research on trust signals found a badge works largely on prior recognition of that badge. An unattributed quote and a borrowed logo take the best space on the page and return nothing, while the facts below cost you nothing to publish.
Count what you can actually stand behind
Every business has countable facts on day one, none of them requiring a client’s permission.
- Years in the craft, stated separately from years trading under this name. Giving both beats merging them into one flattering figure.
- Quantities of work completed, described by type rather than by client. Sites migrated, cases handled, rooms fitted, counted honestly and dated.
- Qualifications and memberships, each with its issuing body. A credential without its issuer is a word, and a reader cannot verify a word.
- The constraints you work within. Turnaround, capacity and the size of job you accept show somebody has thought about delivery.
Treat the first three jobs as the record you are building
Ask each early client for two things once the work has landed well: permission to describe it by vertical, and one countable outcome you may publish without their name. Vertical-only description keeps you inside the rule that protects them, and a countable outcome keeps you out of vague-adjective territory. The Evidence of Effort a Reader Can Actually See sets out visible proof in general terms.
Until those permissions exist, say so plainly. A page pretending to a history it cannot produce reads worse than a short page that does not pretend, because a reader who catches one unverifiable claim starts discounting the verifiable ones sitting beside it.
Book a free diagnosis
If you have drafted an About page and cannot tell whether it establishes anything a stranger could check, send it to me. I will read it against the four items above and say which ones it answers today.
Markup Turns the Page Into a Record a Machine Can Read
Add Organization markup here, on the page whose content it describes. Structured data adds no facts, it labels the ones already written, so it only works when those four items are genuinely on the page.
The useful properties mirror what a reader checks. The schema.org spec for Organization defines them, and the set that matters is small: founder for the named person, foundingDate for the tenure, knowsAbout for the described work, sameAs for the profiles corroborating all three. Yoast’s documentation on author and organization markup covers filling them in without hand-writing JSON-LD.
Consistency is what makes those labels worth having. Google’s documentation on representing your business asks owners to be upfront and honest in the business description, and a founding date that contradicts your business profile costs more than the field was ever worth. The rest of the markup a build emits lives on other page types, and AI Overviews and the Six Schema Types a Build Emits covers the full set.
Entity clarity across the whole site is the wider version of the same work, in Content That Ranks and Gets Cited by AI, and the question block this page should carry is in How to Write FAQs That Double as AEO Fuel. On a site nothing has indexed yet, the About page is often the only description of the business that exists anywhere, which is the situation SEO for AI Search When Nothing Else Mentions You Yet deals with.
Where a Second Reader Changes What Comes Out
An About page with no client list and a team of one is a job for one person. Two conditions change that, and neither is about writing ability.
The first is scope. Past roughly three named people the page becomes coordination: gathering histories from people who describe their own work badly, keeping each tenure consistent between the bio and the page, and deciding which overlapping specialism each person owns before two of them claim it.
The second is review. Where the credibility you show rests on licences, credentials or claims about qualified work, somebody other than the writer should read the page before it ships. That is a second reader on accuracy, and where a rule applies to your field the person to ask is your own adviser.
Both conditions describe the size and shape of the work rather than the person doing it. What has changed by the time either one arrives is that the page stopped being a piece of writing and became a piece of coordination.
Credibility gets a reader considered, and that is the limit of what an About page can do for you. Once they believe somebody competent is behind the work, the next thing they want to know is what actually arrives, and that belongs to the service page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should you put on your About page?
Four things, in the order a reader checks them: who does the work by name, how long they have done it and what they did before, what the work actually is in the buyer’s own words, and what you decline to take on. Everything else is optional and competes with those four for space.
What does a good About page look like?
It reads as an entity record rather than a mood piece. A stranger finishes it able to say who runs the business, roughly how long it has operated, what it delivers and for whom, and one thing it refuses. Real photographs and full names appear. Abstract mission language does not.
What is a good bio for a business page?
Write it in first person when one person does the work. Name yourself, state your tenure in the craft separately from your tenure under this business name, give the prior role the current work grew out of, and say what you are accountable for. Third person on a one-person business removes the signal the bio exists to carry.
How do you prove your work experience on a website?
Publish counts you can stand behind and descriptions that name nobody. Years in the craft, quantities of work completed by type, qualifications with their issuing bodies, and the constraints you work within are all verifiable without a client agreeing to anything. Unattributed testimonials and unfamiliar trust badges add very little.
What is some sample content for an About Us page?
Use the section shape rather than sample copy, because pasted samples produce a page identical to everybody else’s. The shape is: named people first, then history and prior work, then a plain description of the work, then what you decline, then contact. Fill each with facts only you hold.
Does an About page help a site rank?
No page guarantees a ranking lift, and this one is worth writing for a different reason. Google’s rater guidelines direct raters to find information about who is responsible for a site and its content, so a page supplying it clearly makes the business easier to identify and assess, particularly when nothing else has indexed you yet.
Continue Reading:
Previously in this series
- AI Website Copy: Which Sentences to Keep and Cut, the six categories of fact this page runs on, and how to get them out of your head.
Next in this series
- Service Page Content Examples: Six Sections in Order, what the buyer receives, because credibility gets a reader considered and the offer still has to be named.
From the library
- Writing for E-E-A-T: Prove Experience on the Page, proof your experience section only partly covers.
- The Evidence of Effort a Reader Can Actually See, which effort signals a stranger actually notices first.
- The AI Tells That Cost You Readers, Not Rankings, sentence-level tells that turn first-person proof into generic filler.
- Content That Ranks and Gets Cited by AI, serving a reader and a crawler with the same page.
- How to Write FAQs That Double as AEO Fuel, handing those same facts to a machine in FAQ form.
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