The about page usually gets thrown together last, on the assumption that the service page is what sells. Look at how people move through a site, though, and this is the page they reopen right before deciding. Having read the service and the price, they come here before pressing the enquiry button to work out who they would be dealing with.
For a business of one, or two or three, it carries even more weight. The brand cannot yet stand in for trust, so the people and the working method are the evidence.
Three things visitors are checking
Are you real is the most basic and the most frequently missing. Company details, a contact route and a genuine location are not decoration; they are evidence of existence. They are often a legal requirement too, but quite apart from that, they are what somebody about to pay looks for first.
Can you do this is answered by the specificity of the problems you describe, not by years of experience. “We handle this situation this way” is a far stronger signal than “ten years in the industry”, because the first can be judged by the reader and the second cannot be verified at all.
Who do I talk to is decisive for small firms in particular. That the person does not change, how quickly you reply, how you communicate during the work — this is exactly where a small business outperforms a large one, so it deserves saying out loud.
Why a company timeline does nothing
“Founded 2019, moved office 2021, expanded 2023” answers none of the three questions. What the reader wants is not your history but whether their problem will be solved.
What the left-hand items share is that they still work with another company’s name in them. If a sentence reads perfectly well after swapping the name, that sentence is not describing you. This substitution test is the fastest tool there is for editing an about page.
When there are things you cannot show
Sometimes clients cannot be named, or the operation feels too small to put on display. The answer is substituting different evidence, not inventing what does not exist. The strongest substitute is publishing how you work: the order you do things in, what you verify, and what happens when something goes wrong.
A described process builds more trust than a list of names, because names cannot be verified while a process can be judged by the reader. It is the same reason we publish our working process rather than client case studies.
This page works in search too
Someone searching your company name already knows of you and is generally verifying something. So the trading name, the person responsible, the location and the contact details need to be exact here and consistent with everywhere else on the site. Where the same details are written differently in different places, the picture in search results wobbles too.
Attaching author information to articles pays off for the same reason: when it is clear who wrote something, your content and your about page reinforce each other.
Building trust signals into page structure is covered further in the SEO archive, and the screens immediately before payment are the subject of the turning the site into revenue series. To have the site’s structure and search visibility sorted as one job, see our optimization program.