So you’ve decided that you want to create a website. Fantastic! One of the first things you’ll need to do is identify what you want on your new site and think about what the pages will look like. Sounds like a great place to start!
Like any other website, yours will need a ‘Home’ page plus a couple of content pages that further establish what you do and why you’re so good at it.
Additionally, your site won’t be complete without an ‘About Us’ page and a ‘Contact’ page. The ‘About Us’ page is what this article will focus on.
Why is the ‘About Us’ page so important
Unfortunately, the organization of most websites condemns the ‘About Us’ page to a sorry existence where it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. The ‘About Us’ page shouldn’t be an afterthought like the sprouts at Thanksgiving dinner.
Rather, let’s try to think of the page as something more like gravy that adds flavour to your turkey, the centerpiece of your holiday meal!
Drawing an example from the world of business, think of the ‘About Us’ page as your chance to deliver an elevator pitch. Keep it short and simple, but don’t pass up the opportunity to talk about what you and your company are good at. It’s a great chance to convince your audience that they should be doing business with you.
You should make sure to provide some good examples of successful testimonials. And to tie it all up, make sure to provide any essential information that your audience might need.
We have put together a simple 9 step plan that you can follow if you want to create an effective ‘About Us’ page for your website.
- How will you communicate the information on this page using the brand voice that you’ve chosen for your business?
- What photos and videos will you use on this page?
- How can you tie in your ‘About Us’ page to the other pages on your website or other aspects of your business, like your social media presence?
Take a moment to ask yourself these questions and note your answers. Once you’ve identified what you want and don’t want on your ‘About Us’ page, you’ll have a punch list to work through, making your job a lot easier!
1. Start with a structure
One of the best places to start any project is by creating an outline. Just like a chef prepares a list of ingredients before they actually start cooking or an architect first draws up a blueprint, it’s always very important to know what you need to do before you start doing it.
You probably created an outline of some sort when you designed your website. Now, you should do it again for your ‘About Us’ page.
When coming up with the structure of your ‘About Us’ page, ask yourself a few questions:
- What information do you want on this page? Also important, what information don’t you want on this page?
- How will the page be structured? How many sections, paragraphs, and visual content pieces will the page have?
2. Started from the bottom…
People love a good story, and this is your chance to tell them one. Use your ‘About Us’ page to share some background information on how your business came to be.
Maybe you were out hiking one day when you realised that you wanted to quit your job and go out on your own. That sounds fantastic, and well worthy of a mention on your ‘About Us’ page! Or, maybe your great-grandmother taught you how to bake, you inherited her recipes and then opened up your own bakery. This is a truly inspiring story!
You should also make sure to share only those parts of your business history that you’re actually comfortable with the internet knowing. Business secrets, secret ingredients, or unsavoury hurdles that you may have had to overcome would be best left out.
3. Now we’re here!
Once you’ve established how your business came to be, people will want to know about how far you’ve come. Take this opportunity to talk about how your business has grown and developed over the years, how many satisfied customers you’ve had, and how much of an impact you’ve made on people’s lives.
As always, it’s also very important to avoid oversharing. Don’t give away too much information about your business and the products/solutions you provide. You’ll risk explaining away your customers’ reason to get in touch with you.
The last thing you want to do is reveal everything about yourself. This will give your audience the chance to closely compare you with your competitors. A little mystery is better at this point.
The primary purpose of your website is to generate leads that you can then convert into business using a dose of good ol’ personal interaction.
It’s also important to not disclose too much information about your jobs with previous clients, even if they’re happy for you to share it.
4. Use your brand’s voice
As you’re well aware, every brand has its own voice or tone that has been specifically developed after careful consideration. There are a lot of factors that impact what your brand’s tone should be like.
The industry that you operate in, the demographic of customers that you target, the price of the products or services you offer–all of these are important points to consider when you’re developing a unique tone for your brand.
If you’re at the stage where you’re making a website for your business, chances are that you already have an established voice for your brand. Most likely, this voice already comes through in your social media presence, the existing content that you have on your site, and any designs or graphics that you’ve created.
Your ‘About Us’ page should be no different, and your brand voice should be evident in whatever you put on this page. Chances are, you knew this point already, but it’s good to re-establish it once again.
5. Throw in some eye candy
People hate reading a wall of text. You’ve probably been there yourself.
You’re looking for something on the web and you come across a website that has text from top to bottom. Situations like that leave users with no choice but to click the Back button and look for another site that can help them with what they’re after. Under no circumstances should you make this mistake.
When creating your ‘About Us’ page, make sure to break up the text with some well placed images or videos. Properly placed graphics give readers a chance to catch their breath and offer a nice break from reading to the eyes.
A picture is worth a thousand words. When you’re creating a website, that old saying is right on the money. Human beings find it much easier to remember images than text. This is something you should be aware of if you want to leave a lasting impact on your audience. So, feel free to replace a couple of paragraphs with a nice graphic in order to convey your message better.
6. Keep an eye out for mistakes
This one really is a no-brainer and should apply to everything you write. Improper spelling and grammar are a massive turn-off and will leave your audience with a bad impression.
Just think about it, why would a customer trust you with their hard earned money when you have glaring spelling mistakes on your website. If even your website shows a lack of attention to detail, then how can a customer trust you to show them the proper care that they deserve?
Make sure to proofread all of the content that you write before putting it out for the entire world to see. You should also consider using Grammarly or another spelling and grammar checker. Tools like that can make your proofreading task much easier.
Another good idea is to have someone else proofread your work. Sheer boredom is often a big reason why people find it hard to go through their writing a couple of times.
You’ve already spent time creating a structure and then filling it in with killer content that fits your brand voice. That’s time consuming enough, isn’t it? This is where a fresh pair of eyes can come in handy, as someone who is new to the text may find it easier to go through than you would.
7. Know your SEO
Search Engine Optimization is an incredibly important aspect of your website, and your ‘About Us’ page is not exempt from SEO best practices. It’s no use being good at what you do if customers can’t find you, and good SEO is the key to being found.
You should always apply these SEO best practices when creating your ‘About Us’ page:
- Make sure to use relevant keywords. Once again, this should be an easy enough thing to do, assuming that you already have a list of keywords that are relevant to you and your industry. With the list ready to go, it’s just a matter of incorporating them naturally in your content.
As with everything else, don’t overdo this because the last thing anyone wants to read is keyword-stuffed text. - Ensure that the structure of your ‘About Us’ page (and your entire website) is Google friendly. This means that every page on your site should have one title, followed by relevant subtitles. This is where it becomes important to use heading tags like H1, H2, etc.
Having your pages properly structured makes it easier for search engines to understand the content that you’ve got on your site. - Optimize your images and videos. As you may know, images and videos can often have a large file size, which is definitely not wanted when you’re trying to make a fast-loading website.
Large image and video file sizes result in longer load times, which affect your website badly in two ways. Firstly, if your site doesn’t load quickly, your readers will simply return to Google and find another site to check out.
Secondly, load times are one of the biggest factors that affect where you rank on search engines. The longer the load time, the lower your site is going to be ranked. Spend a little time optimizing your images and videos and you’ll be doing yourself a massive favor.
8. Share your social presence
Social media is a massive part of running a successful business in this day and age, and your ‘About Us’ page is a great place to show off your ‘Gram. Yes, your homepage and contact page should definitely link to your social media presence as well, but there’s no reason that your ‘About Us’ page should not.
Visitor engagement is a major reason to have a website, but often, the ‘About Us’ page doesn’t have a call-to-action. In that case, adding links to your social media on your ‘About Us’ page can be the perfect way to keep your readers engaged with your brand.
9. Show off your street cred
Modesty is great, but when it comes to business, you need to pull out all the stops in order to succeed. As briefly mentioned in Step 3, your ‘About Us’ page can be the perfect place to host some of the fantastic feedback and rave reviews that you worked so hard to get.
Reviews and recommendations are, hands down, the best way to win the trust of your visitors. Good reviews and ratings can make or break a business, and if you do have some great feedback from your clients, then you should definitely show it off.
Testimonials are another great way to showcase the fact that people like the products or services you offer. Testimonials are different from reviews because they are more direct and detailed; they are clearly intended to promote your business.
They can often be misunderstood as being a bit manufactured, but testimonials are still a very popular method of showcasing a brand’s trust levels in the market.
The ‘About Us’ page is really a very important part of your website, and one that you should strive to keep in tip-top shape. If you can follow a few of the steps that we’ve covered, then you should have a pretty good ‘About Us’ page when you’re finished.
Online businesses these days are all about making a real impact in a short amount of time. A good ‘About Us’ page will not only tell your readers more about your business, it will also share information about how highly others think of you.
It will highlight your brand’s goodwill, provide relevant information, and tie in with other aspects of your online presence. An ‘About Us’ page that covers all these bases is surely going to be an effective one that really appeals to your audience and converts them into customers!
What kind of story did you tell on the ‘About Us’ page on your website?