How to Make an About Page: The 7 Best Practices plus 10 Examples

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Which of your pages is the most important to your visitors? To find out just pop open Analytics. Look at the pages report. They’ll all be there at the top.?And there’s one page that’s sure to be in the mix:

It’s your About page.

Once you’ve filtered out those blockbuster blog posts, it will be there in the top 10 pages. It’s usually the top five. It’s true in virtually all Analytics accounts, or at least the 500+ accounts that we have access to.

And it’s no surprise. The About Us page is the page most likely to answer the big questions that visitors have about your brand.

• Who are the people who work here?
• What do these people believe?

Emmily Soccorsy,?Root + River

“This reinforces what we know to be true about human behavior. We buy from people, not from companies. Visitors to your website are seeking to make a direct, heartfelt and human connection with the people we are buying from. When your website visitors go to your About page, they want to be moved, they want to feel something. They want to be connected to what you stand for.”

If you doubt that your values are important to your visitor, look at the data from the?Edelman Trust Barometer. It’s a global survey of 36,000 respondents in 28 countries, tracking trust and perception.

The research shows that now, more than any time in the 22 year history of the survey, customers, clients and job candidates all want to know your beliefs and values.

58% of respondents buy from brands based on their beliefs and values. And 60% of job candidates choose a place to work based on their beliefs and values.

The message is clear. Your About page is a critical step on the path of your next prospect. It tells your story and answers key questions that are important to prospects and candidates.

So let’s look at the About page best practices. Like all web design best practices, they are guidelines, not rules. None are mandatory. Each of these aligns with an element of storytelling and each answers a specific question for the visitor.

Here they are on a little About page design template so we can see them all in one place.

Before we break down these best practices in detail, let’s quickly look at some design and content considerations. These help answer the big UX question: How to design an About page?

Pick your navigation label

It’s always an item in the main menu. Common options for the label are?About (or About Us), Company Profile, Our Story, Firm Profile.?We’ve never seen a difference in clickthrough rates based on the website navigation label. They all basically convey the same thing: this is the page specifically about the brand and the people.

Single page? Or About Us section?

For many sites (this one included) the About content is more than one page. It’s an actual section, with a small set of pages, each addressing an about-related subtopic. This works well, but beware of “thin content.” There is no need to make a separate page for?your mission?if the mission is just 100 words. Don’t break up pages unless the pages are long.

Add visuals

There will be text of course. But the visuals are important. The About page is an excellent place for a?video, which is basically an 8-minute documentary about the brand. This is also a key place to add visuals such as?images of people?and badges, like?awards, certifications, memberships?or other trust seals.

Forget about keywords

About pages are not a search engine optimization (SEO) opportunity because they aren’t keyphrase-focused. Unlike service pages and articles, which often target keyphrases, About pages don’t target a phrase other than the brand, and the homepage ranks for that.

This doesn’t mean they don’t attract visitors from search. They often are landing pages, but not because they rank in the usual ways. Searchers land on them because of sitelinks, which are the additional links listed below a ranking URL in search results.

Look for schema opportunities

But there is still a small SEO opportunity: there are?schema for About pages.

Schema are special tags that tell a search engine what kind of data it’s looking at. It’s a technical SEO thing. They’re added through a bit of programming. They improve how data is passed into Google which may help enhance search results or populate a knowledge panel.

About page schema include?founder,?specialty,?audience,?award,?funder,?offers?and?provider.

Add a call to action (CTA)

Your About page answers sales questions, like any service page in any web design. So it’s no surprise that the About page is on the path to conversion. With that in mind, it should have a call to action.

Although you could add a CTA button for email signups for content marketing, remember, this is a page for your potential customers and prospects. So it’s better to make the CTA for your primary offer, for lead generation.

To prove that About page visitors convert into leads, check your Analytics. In Universal Analytics, the Navigation Summary of your About page shows the clickthrough rate on that CTA. It’s often very high.

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