Why your About page earns its keep

Most specialist businesses treat the About page as an afterthought — a place for a paragraph of history and a stock photograph of a handshake. That is a missed opportunity. When someone searches for a niche service, they are often weighing up whether to trust a stranger with something important: a listed building, a rare piece of equipment, a troublesome legal matter, a child's education.

Google looks for the same signals of legitimacy. Pages that name real people, describe a real place of work and explain how a business actually operates tend to satisfy the experience and trust parts of the quality guidelines far better than a page of vague claims. A clear, honest About page supports your rankings and your conversion rate at the same time.

Put names and faces to the business

Visitors want to know who they will actually deal with. Name the people involved, give their roles and say what each of them is responsible for.

• A photograph of each key person, taken in your normal working environment. A phone camera in decent light is fine — a polished studio shot of someone who never answers the phone is less convincing.
• One or two sentences on background: qualifications, years in the trade, the specific problem they enjoy solving.
• Who answers the phone, who prepares quotes, and who turns up on site if that differs from the person who owns the business.

If you work alone, say so plainly. "I run the business, I do the work and I answer the emails" is a reassurance, not a weakness. Add a photograph of yourself at your bench, van, desk or workshop rather than a generic landscape.

Be specific about where you work

Location language does a lot of quiet search engine work. Search engines need to connect your business to a place, and customers need to know whether you will travel to them.

• Name your base town or city, and the areas you cover — counties, postcode districts, or a radius with a sensible limit.
• Mention travel charges or minimum call-outs before someone has to ask.
• If you work remotely, say which regions or time zones you serve and how you handle site visits or deliveries.
• Include a photograph of your premises, workshop or studio if you have one. It confirms there is a real operation behind the website.

For niche providers, this specificity helps you appear for the searches that matter — restoration of Victorian floor tiles in a named county, rather than the hopelessly broad "floor restoration".

Explain how enquiries really work

The gap between someone deciding to get in touch and actually doing it is where most small businesses lose work. Remove the uncertainty by walking through the process in plain steps: what form to complete, how quickly you reply, what information helps you quote accurately, whether you charge for a first visit, and what happens after that.

• Typical response time, in hours or working days — and whether that changes at weekends.
• Whether you prefer phone, email or a form, and why.
• What the customer should have ready: measurements, photographs, documents, access details.
• How you handle urgent or out-of-hours requests, if at all.

Reassure people about their data, too. A short line explaining that enquiry details are only used to respond, and never passed on, is worth more than a lengthy policy nobody reads.

Write like a person, not a brochure

Corporate jargon is the quickest way to sound like everyone else. Swap the following as a habit:

• "Solutions provider" becomes a description of what you actually do.
• "Leveraging synergies" becomes how you work with other trades or suppliers.
• "Bespoke client-centric service" becomes "I visit, measure, quote and fit it myself."
• "Industry-leading" becomes a concrete example, a qualification or a number.

Read your draft aloud. If you would not say it to a customer standing in front of you, rewrite it. Plain sentences also tend to contain the words real customers type into search engines, which helps more than any amount of keyword stuffing.

Keep it current, and easy to find

An About page with a 2019 photograph and a disconnected phone number undermines everything else on the site. Diarise a check every six months: names, roles, contact details, areas covered, insurance or accreditation details with expiry dates, and photographs.

Make the page easy to reach — link from your main menu and your footer, and link to it from individual service pages where trust matters most. Put your business name, trading address where appropriate and the regions you serve in the page text rather than only inside an image, so search engines can read them.

Finally, ask yourself one question: after reading this page, would a cautious stranger feel confident enough to pick up the phone? If the answer is yes, you have written an About page that both customers and search engines can trust.