The About Page That Wins Work

Look at the paths people take through your website before they enquire and you will usually find the same pattern. Homepage, one or two service pages, then About, then contact. The About page sits directly in front of the enquiry, doing the last piece of persuasion, and in most businesses it is the page that has received the least thought since launch.

Why this matters now

The mistake begins with the name. About Us sounds like a page about you, so businesses write their history. In practice it functions as a due diligence page, and the visitor is not curious. They are checking. They have largely decided you can do the work and are now looking for a reason not to proceed.

That changes what belongs on it. The questions a late-stage visitor is carrying are specific: who would I actually be dealing with, are these people real, do they look like they know what they are doing, are they the right size for a job like mine, and what would happen if I got in touch. Your founding year answers none of these.

For service businesses this page carries more weight than for product businesses, because the buyer is not choosing a thing. They are choosing people they will have to work with, often for months. Competence is assumed by this point. What they are assessing is whether the relationship will be any good, and there is no other page attempting to answer that.

There is now a search dimension too. The 2026 core updates rewarded content demonstrating first-hand expertise with identifiable people behind it, and the About page is where authorship and organisational credibility naturally live. A page naming real practitioners with real backgrounds supports every other page on the site. We covered the mechanics in proving experience Google can actually verify.

The commercial upside is unusually cheap to capture. This is one page. You are not rebuilding a site or launching a content programme. An afternoon of honest writing on a page that already sits in front of your enquiry form is about as efficient as conversion work gets.

Common mistakes to avoid

About pages fail in remarkably consistent ways across almost every industry.

Opening with the founding year. Founded in 2011, we have grown from humble beginnings. Nobody deciding whether to enquire is helped by this. It is the least useful sentence on the page and it occupies the most valuable position.
Stock photography of people who do not work there. A visitor checking whether you are real, confronted with a stock image of a diverse team in a glass office, learns something you did not intend. An imperfect real photograph beats a polished fake one every time.
Values without evidence. Integrity, innovation, customer focus. Every competitor claims the same three. If the sentence would be equally true of the business next door, it is doing nothing.
Hiding the team. Businesses that never name anyone read as either very large or slightly evasive. For a small service business, the people are the product, and concealing them removes your main advantage over a bigger competitor.
No route onward. The visitor finishes reading, is now reassured, and finds no obvious next step. This page should end with an action, because the person reading it is closer to enquiring than on any other page.

There is a specific failure around size. Small businesses often write to sound bigger, using we and our team to imply scale they do not have. This is usually counterproductive. A buyer choosing a small firm has frequently chosen deliberately, wanting direct access to the person doing the work. Obscuring that removes the exact thing they were looking for, and it tends to unravel awkwardly at the first meeting.

The opposite failure exists in larger firms: a page so corporate it conveys nothing about who anyone is. If your About page could be swapped with a competitor's by changing the logo, it is not doing the job of differentiating you at the moment the buyer is comparing.

A third failure is subtler and costs enquiries directly. Many About pages describe the business in the abstract and never mention what working together would actually involve. The visitor finishes the page knowing your history and still not knowing whether they would be handed to a junior, whether they get a single point of contact, or how long anything takes. Those are the operational questions a careful buyer is weighing, and answering them is worth more than any amount of narrative about your founding. The same specificity that makes a service page persuasive applies here, and our website copy framework covers the underlying structure.

Quick Strategic Tip

Read your About page out loud and stop at every sentence that would still be true if you swapped in a competitor's name. Delete those sentences. Most About pages lose between half and two thirds of their text to this test, and what remains is the part that was actually working.

Step-by-step plan

This is an afternoon of writing plus a photographer. Work in this order.

Check the traffic first. Look at how often About appears in paths that end in an enquiry. For most service businesses it is high, and knowing your own number tells you how much effort this deserves.
Open with what you do and who for. First sentence. Specific, plain, no history. We build websites for UK professional services firms who need their site to generate enquiries rather than just exist. The visitor should know within one sentence whether they are in the right place.
Name the people who do the work. Real names, real roles, real photographs taken in your actual workplace. For each, one sentence on their background and one on what they specifically handle. This is the section visitors came for.
Explain how you actually operate. How a project starts, who the client deals with day to day, how you communicate, what the first two weeks look like. This is the most reassuring content on the page and almost nobody includes it.
State your size honestly and frame it. We are a team of four is not a weakness. Followed by which means you deal directly with the person doing your work, it becomes a positioning statement. Hiding it helps nobody.
Replace values with evidence. Instead of claiming you are responsive, state your response time. Instead of claiming quality, name a client who has stayed nine years. A specific fact does the work of a paragraph of adjectives.
Say who you are not for. The most underused and most persuasive move available. We are probably the wrong choice if you need the cheapest possible option builds more trust than any positive claim, and it filters enquiries usefully.
Add one piece of proof appropriate to the stage. Not your full testimonial wall. One client relationship described with enough specifics to be checkable, or a relevant accreditation with what it required.
Finish with a clear next step. The visitor is late-stage. Tell them exactly what to do, who will respond and how quickly. Do not make them navigate back to a contact page.
Get real photographs taken. The single highest-impact item on this list and the one most often deferred. A few hours with a photographer in your actual office removes the credibility problem stock imagery creates.

Step seven is worth pushing on because it feels wrong. Naming who you are not for reads as turning away business. What it actually does is signal that you have a defined position and are not simply agreeing to anything, and that is precisely the reassurance a careful buyer is looking for at this point.

About page checklist

Before publishing, confirm all of these.

The first sentence states what you do and who for, not when you were founded.
Real people are named with real roles and real photographs.
Photography shows the actual team in the actual workplace.
How you operate day to day is described concretely.
Team size is stated honestly and framed as a benefit.
Every values claim has been replaced with a checkable fact.
The page states who you are not the right choice for.
One relevant, specific piece of proof appears.
The page ends with a clear next step and a response promise.
No sentence survives that would be equally true of a competitor.

How to measure impact

This page sits close enough to the enquiry that the effect is measurable, unlike most brand work.

Enquiry rate for sessions that included About. The key number. Compare visitors who read About against those who did not. The gap tells you what the page is contributing, and it is usually larger than people expect.

Engagement time on the page. Before and after the rewrite. A page people actually read holds attention noticeably longer, and this moves quickly enough to give early confirmation.

Exit rate. If a high proportion leave from About, the page is closing the visit rather than progressing it. Usually a missing next step rather than bad content.

Enquiry quality. Watch whether enquiries change character after adding the who this is not for section. Fewer poorly-matched enquiries is a win even if total volume dips slightly.

Ask new clients directly. Did you read our About page, and did anything on it matter. Five conversations will teach you more about this page than any dashboard, because the effect is qualitative by nature.

Key terms in plain English

Late-stage page: One visited close to a decision, by someone already interested. Needs reassurance rather than persuasion.

Due diligence: The checking a buyer does before committing. What an About page visit actually is.

Disqualifying statement: Saying who you are not for. Builds trust and improves enquiry quality at the same time.

Substitution test: Reading a sentence and asking whether a competitor could say it unchanged. If yes, it is filler.

Assisted conversion: A page that contributes to an enquiry without being the last one visited. About is almost always one.

Conclusion and next move

The About page is the most consistently wasted page on service business websites. It sits directly in front of the enquiry, gets visited by people who are nearly ready to make contact, and is usually filled with a founding date and three values that every competitor also claims. The visitor arrives with real questions and finds a company history.

Read yours out loud this week and delete every sentence a competitor could have written. Whatever survives is your starting point, and it is usually short. Then add the two things almost no About page has: who actually does the work, and what happens in the first fortnight if somebody gets in touch.