Your About Page Isn't About You.
(Soz).
Along with the Home page, the About page is the most visited page of your website. If your About page is all about you personally, it's missing the mark. Its focus should be on what you can do for your target audience. Good writing helps a potential client take the next step towards working with you. Don't waste this prime real estate.
Here are a few tips to stop readers from clicking away too soon.
Get to the point. Fast. Gnats have better attention spans than most people.
Be interesting. Don't impose the story of why you love what you do or your company's history unless it's relevant. You're a mechanic. You're passionate about cars. Big whoop. But if your grandma smuggled your favourite wrench out of wartime Germany, that's amazing and people will want to hear about it.
Don't whack people over the head with your values. Show, don't tell. You want to build trust, and humans want to deal with good humans. If you're a producer of organic vegetables, integrity matters to your target audience, so you should talk about your sustainable practices on your website. If it's not relevant to what you can do for your clients, bin it.
Enthusiasm is great, but calm the farm on the exclamation marks. Sprinkling hysterical punctuation through everything peaked as a trend in1984 and sharply declined after that. Much like the perm. Overdo it with exclamation marks on your About page (or anywhere, for that matter), and you'll come across as salesy. Be helpful, not annoying.
Don't go down the rabbit hole of corporate-speak. It's mostly meaningless and confusing, and it quickly goes out of date, too. Talking about unpacking ideas and circling back and running things up flagpoles is all wrong. Just say what you do, how you do it, and why in a couple of punchy sentences.
On that note, include a powerful mission statement or USP (Unique Selling Point). I'll be blogging on this next so if you stick around, you'll catch this.
Make sure you have a clear CTA (call to action) to encourage people to make contact with you. If you've made it all about you, they're probably long gone already.
Need help? I'm here.