About Us Content for a Website: 6 Templated Examples
By Mairi Bunce
The About Us page of your website can be a casual hello, a formal introduction, or a history lesson. But whatever you choose, it should be one of the most persuasive pieces of content on your site.
Here, we're breaking down what to include in an About Us page for a startup or a small business — from initial content ideas to the basics of landing page SEO. And we're analysing six different approaches to help you build a page that's true to your business.
How to write an About Us page
If you feel uncomfortable writing about yourself, you're not alone.
But in our experience, you can beat writer's block and get your ideas in order by asking these basic questions before you start:
How do I want to write?
How do you want to talk to your prospective customers and what do you want that relationship to feel like? Done well, finding the right tone does a lot to build a visitor’s trust.
How did I get to where I am today?
In story-writing circles, each piece of your personal story is called a ‘beat’. Identifying these significant moments is a good way to give your reader a thread to follow as they move through your story.
What makes me different?
Telling your readers what makes you unique will show them what they'll gain if they choose to work with you. In marketing circles, this is your value proposition.
What to include in your About Us page
Generally, visitors who click through to your About Us page want to know:
Who you are
Whether you're the best option for fulfilling the need they're trying to fulfil
You might want to tell them:
Where you come from
Which challenges you faced
What motivated you to find the solutions
Where you think you’re going in the future
And it doesn't hurt to be explicitly clear about how this helps them, the visitor.
But since it’s a webpage, you should also write your brand story with SEO in mind.
To write a search engine optimised About Us page, include:
The keywords you think potential customers are searching
A meta description to appear on the search engine results page
Alt tags for the images on the page
Your contact information
Internal links to your product pages, online store, team profiles, or any other relevant parts of your website
You’ll also need an irresistible call to action within your content to make it easy for the reader to become a new customer or find out more. Lots of sites put this at the bottom of the page.
A note on tone of voice
Your brand voice is how your target audience recognises you on your website, social media, email marketing, or wherever else you touch base.
Keeping things conversational is the easiest way to keep the audience reading.
Bulldog (skincare for men) leans into their persona of ‘man’s best friend’ and talks in a down-to-earth way. This puts the customer at ease in an environment where they might otherwise feel uncomfortable or under-informed.
Loaf (a sofa manufacturer) uses casual language to help the prospective customer slow down. Their content invites the visitor to settle in and spend time exploring their furniture options.
Who Gives a Crap (a toilet roll subscription service) are tongue in cheek. They're fun and honest about their love of potty humour, which makes it all the more impactful when they showcase the social enterprise aspect of their business.
Even if you sell to businesses, some simple editing tricks can help to balance professionalism and approachability.
Look at how Airtable and Buffer write their About Us pages. They use contractions (we’re rather than we are), short sentences, and they steer around the jargon that you might expect from software companies.
Most importantly, all these successful pages are written to the reader. Instead of speaking about the business in the third person (KYO believes that…), they use we, or I. And when they write about the things they’ve achieved, they highlight how this benefits the potential customer rather than blowing their own trumpet.
Inspiration for your About Us page: 6 examples to play with
We’ve picked out some different approaches to the About Us page, broken down the things that make them work, and given you some steps to recreate this on your own website.
You might want to choose one approach to try out, or use techniques from all these examples as your visitor scrolls down your page.
The ‘hero’s journey’
The hero’s journey is a trope that you've watched or read a hundred times in film and fiction. It’s a standard story arc about overcoming challenges and finding success — just like you hope to do as a business owner.
The standard beats of the hero’s journey are also one of the best ways to write about your history. They create an interesting brand story that’s easy for your website visitors to follow.
Childs Farm (an organic children’s skincare company) is a great example. The business owner, Joanna Jensen, takes the reader through every stage of her journey. She met the challenge of her daughter’s eczema-prone skin by developing her own sustainable range of products, all while learning how to work in retail.
You might want to use this page template to tell your story:
Introduce yourself, your hometown, your education and working background — whatever’s most relevant to your product or service.
Tell us about the challenge or issue that you wanted to solve, especially if it’s a problem the reader can relate to.
Describe how you got your big idea, and tell us how you felt.
List some issues you had to overcome to get from the eureka moment to the day you hit the shelves, went live, or won your first client
Talk about your growth, success, any awards you’ve won, and what’s next for your business
The timeline
If writing prose isn’t your thing, take a chronological approach to your About Us page.
Using a timeline can work especially well for organisations that have been around for decades (such as the World Wildlife Fund) or for companies that have grown a lot but still want to show that they’re proud of where they came from.
One of the best About Us timelines belongs to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.
Source: Ben & Jerry’s
They keep the reader engaged by mixing important business developments with whacky anecdotes. Most importantly, they keep things human by listing the obstacles they overcame (like the fire which destroyed their bus in 1986).
If you want to write a timeline, make sure to include these important elements:
A description of your company’s origins that highlights how different things were ‘back then’. This will show the reader how far you’ve come.
The names of the people involved to humanise the story and appear grateful to the people who have helped you.
The valleys as well as the peaks. Don't shy away from the moments when things were tough. It makes a much more relatable (and therefore trust-building) story than a list of your accolades.
Details about what you're doing now. This shows that you’re still the best person for the job and invites the reader to be part of the continuing story.
Founder-focused
People buy from people, so it can be helpful to show your prospective customers what goes on behind the scenes.
Focussing on your founders or owners is a smart move for startups and small businesses where the owner’s personality is a key selling point. It’s also useful for larger businesses where the team has grown a lot but you still want to give your site a personal feel.
For Mailchimp (a mailing-list platform for small businesses), being ‘founder-owned’ connects the (very successful) owners to the small businesses they serve. This makes using the About Us page to introduce 'Ben and Dan' a smart move.
If you want to write about your business owners, try emphasising these things:
You’re good at your jobs: emphasise the owner's qualifications and expertise, especially if those are what brought you together.
You’re a team: show that you like each other and enjoy working together.
You’re approachable: this makes the reader think that they would like to work with you too.
Team-focused
If your team is small, you might want to use your About Us page to give everyone a short profile. This can be especially appealing if you’re showing your customers who their main point of contact would be if they choose to work with you.
The team profiles for the Level agency are a great example of professional biographies. Since being women-led and women-owned is a selling point for them, it makes sense to give information about the things the women on their leadership team have accomplished.
It’s also worth noting that big hitters like Hubspot put their global team front and centre. If remote work or international offices are a selling point for you, showing your staff's home cities can be a great way to show how connected you are.
If you want to include profiles for individual team members on your About us Page:
Ask them about their strengths and what they enjoy about their work (this builds authority and credibility)
List their background, birthplace, and what led them into the industry (this makes a connection with the reader)
For informal websites, you might want to include a fun fact about each team member to inject some personality into the profile.
Values
Many visitors come to the About Us page to find out if a company's core values match up with their own. They want to feel like they're making an informed decision about who they choose to buy from or work with.
The global companies GIPHY and Zendesk do this well. They write their values and philosophies in plain English and present them in a way that’s easy to scan. They then give the option to click through for more information about what that means in practical terms.
Source: GIPHY
Even smaller businesses without a written values statement can put this into action. Look at the way that Brooklinen (a bedding store) displays their four ‘core values’ and includes their sustainability policy on their about page.
If you want to include your companies vision and values in your about page:
Write clearly and concisely and avoid buzzwords. You want to show that these things matter to you, not give the impression that you put them on the website because you thought you should.
Back up your mission statement with information on the action you’re taking. You can use statistics, or list initiatives you’ve signed up for.
Testimonials
No matter how much time and effort you put into your copy, sometimes the most convincing statements come from satisfied customers.
Landing pages — including your homepage, your About page, and your Contact Us page — are a great place to display testimonials.
Dribbble (a platform and marketplace for designers to network) uses testimonials and "designer stories" videos on their About Us page. Showing the success that other people in their field have had reassures new designers and encourages them to sign up too.
If you want to include testimonials:
Use a short and snappy paragraph with 2-3 sentences.
Format the testimonial as a quote (e.g. as a quote block on WordPress), so that it stands out from the rest of the content.
Include the job title or qualifications of the person who gave you the testimonial, to lend credibility.
Need help with your About Us page?
There’s no one-size-fits all approach to writing an About Us page. It’s about finding your voice and creating a landing page that reflects your unique story and authentic identity. KYO’s team of web copy specialists will get to the bottom of what makes you tick, and help you craft a page that grabs the attention of readers. Get in touch today for more information.