Many business owners treat their 'About Us' page as an afterthought, but it is actually one of the most important pages on your website. It tells the story of your brand and who it helps - not about you and a boring stream of accolades, nor how great your company is, nor how many years of experience you may have.
Your 'About Us' page needs to be about your target audience and how your company works with them to accomplish a goal, overcome struggles, and achieve amazing results. They want to know how you align with their values, service their needs, and the results you have created for other clients/customers.
You need to answer their question, "What Can You Do For Me" ?
As a general rule, you should try to speak directly to your website users like you having a one on one conversation with them. How you frame the conversation makes a lot of difference also. For example, a sentence like:
"We help small business owners save money by helping them build a solid foundation for their business with our educational courses."
could become:
"Want to save money by properly structuring your business? Our educational courses help you do just that."
See the difference? The first is about us and what we offer, while the second talks about them and their needs.
So what should be on your page? Here are a few points for you to ponder while you decide.
Don't Waste Time on Your Backstory
The history of your company may be of importance to you and may be interesting, but is probably not that important to the people visiting your website. They are more interested in where you are now and where you are going in the future - how you are going to help them in the future.
What should be at the forefront of your page is how you work with clients, your company values, and the results you generate. Create a small section of your About page for your backstory, or better yet, a different page altogether.
Research What Your Target Audience Wants
You need to find out what the people you are trying to attract want to know. You can ask people these questions directly or perhaps send out an anonymous survey. Try to get at least ten responses so you can find the most common answers to help you write your page. An example of some of the questions you may ask are,
- What their #1 goal is.
- What are they struggling with now.
- What have they already tried to solve them.
- What they didn't like about those solutions, or
- What are they looking for in a solution.
Don't Talk About Features
The great features about your product or service should be left where they belong - on the Product and Services pages. Stay focused on how you can improve their lives.
Share Your Company Values
More and more people are taking note of a company's values, whether it be culturally or politically. Your commitment to ethical business practices is more important than ever. Some of the things you can include in this category are:
- Customer support policy.
- Company mission statement.
- Diversity and inclusion statement.
- Environmental statement.
- Volunteer experience,or
- Partnering organizations.
Customers want to know what you stand for and how help to make the world a better place to live.
Don't Write a Book
With so much information coming at us these days, most users just scan web pages to find the information that is the most relevant to them. Stick to the key points and share your company values. That's what they came to find out.
The User Experience
Finally, we should discuss how your page looks. It needs to be easy to navigate by your users. You should have a clear headline at the top of page. The content sections should be organized, with images and calls-to-action throughout. There should be links to the appropriate places in your website where they can find additional information on anything that stands out to them. And likewise, discover other pages on your site that can link to your About Us page.
By doing some research on our target audience and looking at your site from their point of view, you can write an About Us page that will keep your users interest and prompt them to explore your companies products and services in more depth.