Here is an uncomfortable thing about your About page: it is probably the second most visited page on your website, and it is almost certainly the one you spent the least time on.
People go there for a specific reason. They have read enough of your services page to think you might be able to help them, and now they want to know whether they can trust you with the thing they care about. That is a high-stakes moment, and most About pages answer it with a career timeline and a line about being passionate.
The good news is that fixing this does not require a rebrand or a copywriter or three weeks of your life. It mostly requires understanding what the page is actually for, which is different from what most people assume.
What Your Visitor Is Really Asking
Nobody lands on an About page out of curiosity about your childhood. They arrive with a question, and the question is almost never “who are you.”
The question is some version of: can I trust this person with my problem?
Underneath that sit three more specific worries, and a good About page answers all three without ever naming them:
- Do you understand my situation? Not services in general. My situation, with its particular constraints and its particular history of things that did not work.
- Have you done this before, for someone like me? Credentials matter less here than pattern recognition. They want evidence you have seen their problem enough times to know where it goes wrong.
- What is it like to work with you? This is the one that decides. People are not only buying an outcome. They are buying six months of emails, calls, and being told things they may not want to hear.
Every paragraph on the page should be doing work on one of those three. If a sentence is not, it is decoration, and decoration on an About page reads as filler.
Insider Tip from Andrea: The test I use is simple. Read each paragraph and ask whether it lowers the reader’s risk. If it does not reduce the fear that hiring you is a mistake, it does not belong on the page, no matter how true it is.
The Structure That Works
There is a shape to a good About page, and it is stable across almost every service business. You can vary the voice as much as you like. The order is what does the heavy lifting.
- Open with them, not you. The first two sentences should describe the situation the reader is in, in terms they would recognize. This feels backward, because it is an About page and you want to start with yourself. Resist that. Earning the right to talk about yourself takes about thirty words of demonstrating that you understand where they are standing.
- Name what you actually do about it. One clean paragraph. Not your service list, which lives elsewhere. The nature of the work. What changes, in what order, and roughly how long it takes.
- Now the origin story, and keep it short. Two paragraphs at most. The only relevant part of your history is the part that explains why you do the work the way you do. If you left corporate because you kept watching good businesses fail for the same preventable reason, that is worth a paragraph, because it tells the reader something about your judgment. The year you graduated is not.
- Show the pattern. This is where evidence goes. Types of clients, the kinds of problems that keep showing up, the approach you have developed because of it. This is the section most About pages skip entirely, and it is the section that does the most convincing.
- Say what it is like to work with you. How you communicate, how direct you are, what you expect from clients, what you will not do. Specificity here is disqualifying in the best possible way. The people who would have been difficult clients read this and leave. The right ones read it and relax.
- One clear next step. Not “get in touch.” A specific action with a specific low-commitment shape. Book a call, take the assessment, download the thing. One option, not three. A reader who has made it to the bottom of your About page is as close to ready as they will get, and giving them a menu at that moment is the fastest way to lose them to indecision.
The Parts Everyone Gets Wrong
A few patterns show up so consistently that they are worth naming individually.
The credential wall. Certifications, memberships, years of experience, logos of past employers, stacked in the opening section. None of it is bad on its own. All of it is answering a question the reader has not asked yet. Credentials work as reinforcement after you have established relevance, and they read as posturing before it.
“I’m passionate about helping businesses grow.” Every service provider on the internet has written this sentence. It does not differentiate you, and more importantly it does not tell the reader anything they can use to decide. Replace it with the specific belief that shapes your work. “I think most small businesses are doing the right activities in the wrong order” is a real position. Passion is not.
The third-person bio. Writing about yourself as “Andrea has over fifteen years of experience” creates distance exactly where you want closeness. Third person belongs in a conference program or a media kit. On your own website, write as yourself.
The page with no photo. People are deciding whether to trust you, and a face does more for that in half a second than three paragraphs of copy. It does not need to be a studio portrait. It needs to look like the person who will show up on the call.
The wall of text. This one does more damage than any other item on the list. Long unbroken paragraphs on an About page get skimmed and then abandoned. Subheadings, short paragraphs, and a pull quote or two are not stylistic preferences here. They are the difference between a page that gets read and a page that gets scrolled past.
Writing It When You Hate Writing About Yourself
Most people find this page genuinely difficult, and the difficulty is real rather than a confidence problem. You are too close to your own story to know which parts matter.
Three things make it dramatically easier.
Answer questions instead of writing prose. Get a list in front of you and respond to it out loud, ideally recorded. Why do you do this work. What were you doing before. What is the mistake you see most often. What do clients say after working with you. What kind of client is a bad fit. What do you refuse to do. Then transcribe it and edit. The voice will be better than anything you would have typed, because you will have stopped performing.
Write the version you would never publish first. Too honest, too long, too blunt. Get everything down. The publishable version is almost always sitting inside the unpublishable one, and it is far easier to cut than to conjure.
Ask three past clients why they chose you. Their answers will surprise you. The thing you think is your differentiator is usually not the thing that closed them. Often it turns out to be something you barely think about, like how fast you replied to the first email or the fact that you told them something they did not want to hear on the discovery call. Whatever they say, put it on the page in your own words.
Did You Know? Your About page is frequently the page that decides a referral. Someone recommends you, the prospect looks you up, and this is the page they read before deciding whether the recommendation was worth acting on. That makes it a conversion page, not a biography, and it deserves the same attention you would give a sales page.
How Long Should It Be?
Longer than you think, and shorter than you fear.
Somewhere between 500 and 900 words is the range where most service business About pages land well. Under 400 and you have not given anyone enough to trust. Over 1,200 and you have crossed from establishing credibility into asking for a level of interest the reader has not agreed to yet.
Length is less important than density, though. A 600-word page where every paragraph is doing work will outperform a 1,500-word page that spends half its space on your career history. Cut the sentences that could appear on anyone’s About page. Whatever survives is the page.
The Version That Also Works for Search
Since this page gets found directly more often than people expect, a few structural choices help without compromising the writing.
Use your name and what you do in the H1, plainly. “About Andrea” tells a search engine nothing. “About Andrea Orem, Marketing Strategist for Small Businesses” tells it everything, and reads fine to a human.
Include the language your clients actually use for what you do. If they say “marketing help” rather than “growth strategy consulting,” the page should contain both, because one is how you describe it and the other is how they search for it.
Write at least one section in a question-and-answer shape. “Who do you work with?” as a heading, followed by a direct answer, is useful to a human skimming the page and useful to an AI system trying to extract a clean statement about who you serve. The same structural habits that make content citable make this page clearer.
Link to your services and to your next step from inside the body copy, not only from the navigation. Readers who get to the end of an About page are the warmest traffic on your site, and sending them somewhere specific matters more here than anywhere else.
A Quick Audit You Can Run Today
Open your About page and check it against this list. Give yourself a yes or no on each one, honestly.
| Check | Yes / No |
| The first two sentences are about the reader, not me | |
| Someone could tell who I work with in under ten seconds | |
| There is a photo of my actual face | |
| I explain how I work, not only what I do | |
| The origin story is under 200 words | |
| There is evidence, not only claims | |
| Nothing on the page could appear on a competitor’s site unchanged | |
| There is one clear next step at the bottom | |
| It is broken up enough to skim |
Fewer than six yeses means the page is costing you clients. That is not a crisis. It is a two-hour rewrite with a clear brief, which is a much better problem than most marketing problems.
Work through the no answers in order rather than trying to fix everything at once. The first two checks carry the most weight, because a reader who does not see themselves in the opening lines rarely makes it far enough to be impressed by anything further down. Get those right and the rest of the page gets easier to write, because you will have already decided who you are talking to.
Where to Start
If your About page is doing nothing, it is usually a symptom rather than the disease. The page is hard to write because the positioning underneath it has not been settled, and no amount of good copy fixes an unclear answer to “who is this for.”
If that sounds familiar, the Stage Assessment will show you which part of your foundation needs attention first, so you are not rewriting a page that is built on the wrong premise.
And if you would rather work through the positioning with someone before you touch the copy, you can book a strategy session and leave with the answers the page needs.
Write it for the person deciding whether to trust you. Everything else on the page is optional.
