Many website owners consider their work done once their homepage and product pages are completed. Since those are the ones that bring in the money, it stands to reason that they are the only ones you need. Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw in this line of thinking. A website that offers only products and no substance is destined to fail. If you want to become a name in your industry, there is a lot more to it.

Catering to the products and their representation is definitely a must, but you also need to establish yourself as a trustworthy, high-quality, and authoritative brand. Thus, you need some other pages on your website. Blogs will greatly help you in this effort, but they will only catalyze the process. To become a household name, first, the household must know you. They need to be aware of your mission, values, goals, team, and more. So, naturally, you need to add a dedicated page to cater to this need.

The About page is precisely that. Naturally, not just any page will do the trick. You need specific know-how to create a stellar About page. Only then can you enjoy all the benefits it brings.

Why the About page is a must

The About page is much more than just a bio or business card. It has several specific goals that make it a must for any website.

Establishes Credibility

The main goal of your About page is to establish credibility. By giving a glimpse behind the curtains of your brand, you show your audience you have nothing to hide. As you can imagine, each customer feels a bit anxious when spending money on the Internet. Even though by now, as a society, we are used to ordering products and services online, we usually do it from established brands that have proven their credibility. Whenever we need to purchase anything from a new source, a wise user researches the company’s background, who they are, where they are from, and who stands behind them. This is just common sense.

So, just like with anything else, outsourcing this information to third-party websites will only lead to losing customers. Instead, the About page will not only give all the relevant information on your website but will also follow your narrative to assist your marketing and sales strategies.

Gives a human face to your brand

Moreover, users are far more prone to trust another human rather than a faceless corporation. The About page allows you to build just that – a human face. If done right, this will allow you to create a genuine connection with your audience, increasing brand loyalty and boosting your return of customer rating, sales, revenues, and profits.

Separates the brand from the pack

Regardless of your business industry and niche, you will always face competition. Even if you are a pioneer in your field, someone will always try to capitalize on your success. Naturally, you need to be distinguishable. The About page is the easiest way to showcase how unique you are. It’s the place where you can separate yourself from the pack. This can be done with your backstory, your mission, or values. The main point is to showcase your uniqueness. If you manage to become distinguishable from the rest, you will become in a league of your own, without much competition. A great example is Red Bull. Though they offer an energy drink, of which there are hundreds, by showcasing their passion for extreme semi-professional and professional sports, they cater to a vast number of sports enthusiasts without much competition within these subcultures.

Gives your products or services additional value

The About page will also expand your product or service value beyond its primary worth. By showcasing your mission and values, you will put additional leverage on your proposal, making it that much more lucrative for people sharing the same values and mission in life.

Naturally, this will allow you to increase your margins over time without people feeling the raise is unjustified. For example, whenever you want to buy cheese, you will be bothered if the price is well above the average. However, when purchasing a Louis Vitton handbag, the added value won’t bother you at all. It’s because Louis Vuitton has established itself as a high-end, recognizable, and luxurious brand, typically associated with high class and higher living standards.

Boosts SEO

Among other things, the About page is a golden opportunity to boost your SEO. Including various industry-relevant keywords on your About page will boost your presence in the search engines. In turn, it will increase your traffic and visits.

Moreover, by boosting your credibility, search engines will recognize you as a more authoritative website, increasing your overall website rankings. Finally, adding your location and contacts will make you easier to find, raising user experience. Naturally, this will relate to better search engine rankings.

It’s a vital part of the customer’s journey

Finally, the About page is only a stop on your visitor’s customer journey. It’s an essential part of your storytelling. As you probably have noticed from books and movies, characters without a backstory and motivation are most often one-dimensional. This renders them boring, predictive, and, in general, pointless. The same goes for your business. If your product has no context, it can’t stand out from the pack. Take Coca-Cola, for example. Their story of trying to create an intellectual booster with a tonic containing traces amount of coke has become folklore. That’s why Coca-Cola is now worth nearly 100 billion dollars and has 36.5% of the North American market.

So, your About Page is just a small stop on your customer’s way to buying your product or services. Thus, you need to build your About page to function as a lead generator.

Now that we know the About page goals, it’s time to focus on building one for yourself. But before we get to the elements you need, let’s talk a bit about what’s the essence of a good About page.

What makes a good About page

Though what elements you will include in your About page is essential, how you present them will be the difference between succeeding in achieving the page’s goals and failing to do so. Naturally, there are some best practices you need to follow.

Use compelling storytelling

As we already mentioned, the About page is part of your storytelling. Actually, it’s an essential part – the beginning. As you can imagine, not many people will be interested in reading 10,000 words on your background. So, you must infuse compelling storytelling techniques in your About page content. Make sure your story is linear and flowing. Don’t jump from one moment to another without any connection between the two. Also, be sure to work with the tension. Whenever there is high tension, you need to break it with a small joke.

Naturally, there are many techniques for creating a compelling story, but we will discuss this in another dedicated topic.

Write for your audience

As mentioned above, your About page is just a small part of your overall customer journey. So, make sure to have that in mind when writing it. In other words, you must write what your audience wants to learn. You might find a particular story from when you started your business quite amusing, but if it doesn’t bring any valuable information to your customers, it’s utterly pointless.

Regarding your story, focus on how you were just like your customers, with the same problem, and you were looking for a solution. Now, they don’t have to look for a solution, as you can provide them with one instantly. No one needs to know how bored you were with your life, how you dreamed of having a better work-life balance, or how you wondered about what to invest your inheritance in. So, stick to what’s important to your audience, and keep anything else for small talk with your friends.

Humanize your brand

Humanizing your brand is an essential part of creating your brand persona. As already discussed, people prefer communicating with people rather than faceless corporations. Anyone who has tried to contact an unreachable airline knows the feeling of being ignored by a corporation. Thus, humanizing your brand will significantly boost your overall customer experience. Naturally, this comes at a price, as you will have to tend to their needs and actually care about their complaints. But the rewards are well worth it.

The About page is where all of this magic comes to life. Humanizing your brand means you need a brand persona that has its own voice, style, and tone, preferably one that’s not yours. You don’t want to become the face of your business, as you will face increasing pressure with the brand growing. That’s, of course, up to you since you might want your fortune to come with a dose of fame, just like with Elon Musk. On the other hand, not everyone is suitable to be their business’s image. For example, Bernard Aranut is predominantly behind the scenes when it comes to branding.

Regardless of your preferences, you need to make sure your customers communicate with your brand as pals, not as customers. This is the only way to create some form of loyalty and trust.

Maintain your brand persona, voice, style, and tone

While we are on the topic of the brand persona, you must make sure it’s consistent across your entire website. This includes the tone, the voice, the style, everything. Moreover, you need to keep it the same across all channels. Remember that your brand persona is your business’s human form. So, make sure to act as such. The About page doesn’t make any difference, despite it being where you will show the real people behind the persona. This is a delicate task, so give yourself enough time to perfect your delivery.

Avoid industry jargon

Once again, this is a good idea in general. Industry talk is for B2B platforms like Linked In, where you are targeting highly specific audiences. The About page is targeting a broader audience. If we had to put it on the chart, it would target people at the very top of your funnel as a marketing tool and the upper-middle part of the sales funnel.

So, industry jargon is definitely not welcome on your About page. This will only represent your brand as impossible to communicate with to someone unfamiliar with the industry. For example, if you offer plumbing services and add highly-complicated plumbing lingo to your About page, your potential customers will be scared off. They won’t understand a word of what you’re saying. Moreover, you will give the vibe that everyone should know this. So, someone who doesn’t know the terminology will feel embarrassed and choose not to seek your help.

So, keep unnecessarily complicated terminology for conventions.

Use a lot of images and graphics

This should come as no surprise. Images and graphics are essential in creating a friendly and welcoming atmosphere on your webpage. Use many of them and build a visually stunning About page. Show, don’t tell whenever possible, as people prefer to get the information as easily as possible.

So, bet on high-quality, informative images that relay subliminal messages. Use the right colors to convey your overall brand personality and product demeanor. For example, luxury brands are often represented in regal colors or black. Cleaning products will most often rely on warm colors and white, and financial institutions would prefer gold, silver, or green. Find your industry’s colors and see what combinations you can use to make them yours.

Make it unique

The worst thing you can do with an About page is just copy the style and vision of another brand. Your About page must be just as unique as your product or service. It must be a clear representation of the unique personality of your brand. Don’t be tempted to just copy the About page structure and vision from another more successful brand in the same industry. Yes, you can get some inspiration, but make it unique. Make it unmistakably yours. This is the only way you will be able to get the credibility and recognition your brand deserves.

SEO is a must

Finally, your About page must be SEO optimized. As we already mentioned, the About page is an SEO gold mine. So, don’t waste this opportunity to gain even more traction on search engines and find a fresh audience for your website. Making your About page SEO friendly is no different than making your Homepage SEO friendly, so don’t waste this opportunity.

Now that we know what makes an About page a winner, it’s time to fill it up with content.

The 10 key elements of stellar About pages

Probably the most important question regarding your About page is its content. You need to decide what to put inside, how to present it, how to formulate it, and how to arrange it. While the representation and arrangement depend entirely on the overall vibe of your brand and website, some elements must be present in any About page if you want it to succeed in all of its goals.

Talk about your brand’s story

First and foremost, your About page must showcase your story. Still, as already noted, you need to write your story so that it will be attractive to your audience. Your story is essential to your identity and will determine what type of customers you will attract. Don’t go too in-depth with your story, and make it scannable. You can even add a graphical representation of all your milestones or something like this:

While it’s wise to represent your brand’s history with the audience’s interests in mind, don’t hesitate to add some charming, awe-inspiring, or human moments of cheer or sadness. This will make your story more compelling.

Most importantly, try to establish your motivation, your journey, and your success.

State your mission and core values

Many companies (like us) start precisely here, as this is the most fundamental cornerstone of any brand. The mission is the driving force behind any endeavor, strategy, or campaign. So, naturally, it stands to reason to be up and front. However, you can also start with your history if you want to give some context of how you got to find your mission and establish your core values. Regardless, the brand mission and core values are integral to your About page.

The mission is what gives extra value to your product. Often, especially when it comes to food, apparel, and luxury items, people identify with the brand because they seek something more than the product. They seek a society, fan club, or movement somewhere they belong. BMW is a prime example, with its customers ready to pay any additional price as long as they get to be in the BMW club.

So, when writing your mission and core values, try to identify with your target audience so it will reflect and recognize your mission as their own. Tesla is an excellent example of this trend, with their short but clear mission “Accelerating the World’s transition to Sustainable energy.”

This works on multiple levels. Firstly, it’s a great mission that has millions of supporters worldwide. Moreover, it incorporates their unique selling proposition.

State your successes

Always celebrate your victories and be sure everyone knows about them. Your awards and successes should be everywhere, but especially on your About page. Whenever you receive an award, a nomination, or just a positive mention in the media, make sure to share it on your About page. This will project authority and dramatically increase your credibility.

Don’t waste too much space on the awards here, though, as they will also be present on your Homepage. Either mention how many awards you’ve received over the years or highlight them with a badge or picture from the award ceremony.

Showcase your product or service.

The main point of your About page is to present your product or service in the context of why you started producing/doing it. The main focus should be the solution you offer. People often overthink this point as they try to write something way more complicated than it needs to be. All you need to do is represent your product or service, what it does, and what motivated you to go into business making precisely this.

When it comes to services, most often, it’s the lack of good enough services in the area where you started. Being honest here is both a good and a bad idea. It’s good because you must be genuine about what you are trying to achieve by entering this industry precisely. It’s bad because if you only state the money as your driving motive, you’d most probably lose a lot of customers. So, try to figure out why you chose this market without sounding like Scrooge McDuck.

State your limitations

No matter if you offer products or services, there are limitations to your abilities. Whenever you start a business, you know you can’t help everyone. You have a specific target audience in mind, and they should be your priority. More importantly, if you manage to weed out those whom you can’t help, it will save you a lot of effort and time.

So, make sure to state the limitations of your product or service on your About page. For example, if you operate only in the US and Canada, make sure to mention it specifically. Most services are local, so why bother answering questions from people who are 3000 miles away with no prospect of becoming your customers?
Also, if you don’t do specific jobs within the same industry, make sure to mention those specifically. For example, if you repair cars but can’t repair EVs, be sure to specify this on your About page.

Talk about whom you serve

Next on the agenda is whom you are targeting. In general, this is a statement that showcases the groups of people you’d like to have within your inner circle. Naturally, this can’t be blatantly stated, as people, of course, don’t like to be referred to as targets. So, try to be a bit more subtle about it. The Museum of Modern Art is a great example.

They clearly identify the traits they are looking for in a customer. The targeting is quite good, as it obviously describes more liberal-leaning individuals, as they are most often the patrons of modern and contemporary arts.

Pitch your unique selling proposition

The last two points will naturally lead you here – the unique selling proposition. This is what will separate you from the bench and either win or lose a prospective customer. Usually, any product or service caters to a specific need.

Naturally, there are many solutions to the same problem, so your job is to advocate yours as the best. In our case, this is quite obvious. Before we started our business, we were frustrated by several problems with the hosting industry, like cancellation fees, charges for every little additional help, no uptime guarantees, and no testing periods. Naturally, when we created our business, we set out to address all these problems, so now our unique proposition is closely related to the solution to all these problems.

Let your teammates take the spotlight

Showcasing your team is essential for boosting your credibility and giving your brand a face. By giving your audience a chance to look behind the mask, you show them that you have nothing to hide. Moreover, you stand with your face and name to prove that you are there to take responsibility for every action of your company. This is nothing short of a power move that will make you much more trustworthy.

So, pay for a photo session of your core team or at least the management and make identical branded photos. After that, write each person’s job and qualifications so your customers would know they are in good, capable, and professional hands.

Contact Information

Adding a physical address, a telephone number, and an e-mail will significantly benefit your credibility. Most customers feel safer dealing with businesses that can be reached physically. Moreover, this can help you find new customers close to your location.

If you are reluctant to give your physical address (if you are a freelancer and work from home, for example), you can leave your phone or add a meeting link where people can schedule an online call with you without too much hassle. The main point is to give your audience as many contacts as possible. So, naturally, including all your social media icons here is a must.

CTA

Finally, don’t forget that your About page is just a step in the overall customer journey. So, to further your story, you need to redirect the audience to another page. The CTA can lead to a bunch of places – the blog, the homepage, product pages, social media accounts, or  even an invite for subscription, access to a flipbook, or download a brochure or eBook.

This will depend on how far along the customer journey your About page is positioned. If it’s toward the end, the product page is the obvious choice. The homepage is a better solution if the About page is at the very start or an entry point. Regardless, a CTA is a must.

The About page is a small piece of the puzzle

Yes, the About page is just a pebble in your overall digital marketing strategy. Yet, it depends on your efforts if this pebble will be an obstacle or an integral part of your customer journey. Following these best practices, you can build one astounding About page that will manage to build up your credibility, humanize your brand, give your products or services additional value, separate you from the pack, boost your SEO, and help you bring in more leads.

However, a stellar About page won’t do anything if users are unable to see it. Poor loading time, security issues, and problems with the server can be detrimental to your efforts. So, your first step, before you start thinking about your About page, is to get a HostArmada hosting service. We offer lightning-fast speed, top-notch security, and impeccable reliability with 99.9% guaranteed uptime. So, check out our plans and choose the one that best suits your needs. Don’t let your gorgeous About Us page fall into oblivion because of someone else’s poor infrastructure. Come to the best to receive the best.