After your homepage, the About Us page may be the most visited page on your website. And yet, too many companies treat this valuable real estate like an afterthought. They knock off a paragraph about their passion for making widgets or selling real estate and call it a day.
This is a huge missed opportunity!
With so many eyes on this content, it needs to be some of the best work on your website. While a bad About Us page probably won’t destroy your business, it will leave conversions and sales on the table.
If you’re making these 6 frequent mistakes, it’s time for a rewrite.
1. It doesn’t show your personality
This is a common problem with website writing. People default to corporate-speak and start using phrases they’d never use in real life, like ideation and leverage. Cut out the jargon and just write like you talk!
Small businesses shouldn’t hide their personalities behind the veil of boring corporate lingo. There’s nothing wrong with a fun or clever voice, especially in your About Us page.
For a great example of this, check out Velocity Partners Who We Are page. As a B2B content marketing agency, it would be easy for them to be stiff. Instead, they wrote a fun little blurb about every team member so potential customers could get an idea of the personalities behind the brand.
2. It focuses too much on you
Yes, it’s called an “About Us” page. So you will need to talk some about yourself and/or the company. But if you drone on for a full page about how great you are, your readers are going to zone out fast.
Dale Carnegie famously said, “…a person’s name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” The quote speaks to a broader point — the most interesting thing in our lives is us. So while your reader may have some interest in you, what they really want to know is how you can benefit them.
You have to relate your story back to a benefit for the reader — aka, your potential customer. This doesn’t mean you should turn your About Us page into a sales page. But you should include what sets your company apart from the competition, and how that can solve the reader’s problem.
3. It doesn’t have a strong headline
If the headline of your About Us page says “About Us,” we need to fix that pronto. Your headline needs to hook the reader right off the bat, above the fold. That doesn’t mean it needs to be flashy or clever. In fact, clever copy can sometimes be confusing. Aim for clarity instead.
A good example is on the About Us page for Copyhackers. Their headline reads, “Helping Great Businesses Build Audiences.” It’s short and to the point, and tells you exactly what the company is all about.
4. It doesn’t include social proof
You can talk about yourself until you’re blue in the face, and it still won’t have the same impact as someone else’s words. One study showed that 88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family.
Testimonials and reviews can be sprinkled throughout your website for a little dash of word-of-mouth. You can also include a list of clients you’ve worked with, or publications that you’ve been quoted in.
5. It doesn’t show your face
Small businesses and solo-preneurs don’t have the marketing budgets and resources that the giant mega-corps have. But they do have the ability to forge genuine relationships with their customers.
It’s much easier to create a relationship when you put a face to the brand. Digital marketer Neil Patel knows this, and that’s why he puts his smiling face all over his website. Hire a photographer for a few hours and get some professional photos taken of yourself and your team.
6. It doesn’t tell the reader what to do next
With a higher traffic volume than most other pages on your website, the About Us page is a perfect opportunity to ask the reader to take action. You can redirect them to a sales or product page, or send them to your contact page if you run a service-based business.
You could also use this real estate to ask readers to sign up for your email list. Increase your conversion rate by offering a lead magnet on this prominent page. Your lead magnet will be a free giveaway that readers can unlock by providing their email addresses. This could be a video training, PDF guide, checklist, or anything else that will be appealing to your potential customers.
Make sure the Call to Action stands out. Instead of just adding a link, add a nice clickable button in a bright color. Studies show that buttons have a much higher click-through-rate than links.
Your turn…
Now it’s time for an audit. Is your About Us page making one (or more) of these six mistakes? If so, you’re actually in good company. Some major brands make these errors on their sites. But now that you know better, spend an hour or two brushing up your content.
Track your conversions both before and after you make these upgrades, and watch those numbers go up!