Say you are choosing between two electricians. Both websites look tidy. One About page gives you a name, a face, the year the business started, and the trade association it belongs to. The other gives you a single paragraph that could belong to any company, anywhere: we are passionate about quality and committed to our customers. Which one would you feel safer calling?
The About page tends to be treated as a box to tick, something to fill with a friendly sentence and forget. That is a missed chance. It is one of the few pages where you get to prove, in plain terms, that you are a specific, real, accountable business and not a faceless brochure. Both a cautious customer and the wider picture search results build of you can respond to that, so it is worth doing properly.
Why does the About page carry more weight than it looks?
When someone lands on your site, they are quietly asking one question: is this a real business I can trust with my money? Your services page tells them what you sell. Your About page tells them who is selling it. A vague page leaves that question unanswered, and an unanswered question often means the visitor keeps looking. A page full of concrete, checkable detail can settle it.
Detail also gives search results something to work with. A page that clearly names a real, established business in a real place, with real people and real qualifications, reads as more legitimate than a generic paragraph, and that can help how you show up over time. To make this checkable rather than vague, run your page through a short, named framework: the Five Proofs of a Real Business. Each proof is one thing a stranger should be able to confirm from your About page alone. Work through all five below.
1. Can a stranger find the real people behind it?
Names and faces do a lot of quiet work. A visitor who can see the owner, the founder, or the small team tends to feel they are dealing with people who can be held accountable, not an anonymous logo.
- Check for real names. At least the owner or founder, ideally the core team.
- Check for real photos of those people. Not stock models. A plain, honest headshot beats a polished stranger.
- Check for a human sentence. Why this person does this work, in their own voice, says more than three lines of corporate filler.
If your page could have been written about any business in your trade, this proof has failed.
2. Does the page show where you started and how far you have come?
History is proof you have survived. A business that can point to when and why it began signals experience that a brand-new competitor cannot claim.
- Check for a founding year or a starting point. Serving the area since 2011 is concrete; years of experience is not.
- Check for a short origin story. Imagine a bakery that started as a market stall before taking a shop. That one line explains who they are better than any slogan.
- Check for honest scale. A one-person operation can say so with pride. Pretending to be bigger than you are tends to backfire the moment a customer meets you.
3. Are your credentials on the page, not just in your head?
You may hold qualifications, licences, insurance, and memberships that a customer would care about a great deal. If they live only in a drawer, they do no work for you.
- Check for trade qualifications and licences relevant to your field, named plainly.
- Check for memberships and accreditations, such as a trade body or a local business association.
- Check for insurance where customers reasonably expect it, for example anyone working inside a home.
Say you run a plumbing business. The line fully insured, registered with our national trade body answers a worry the customer already had before they picked up the phone. That can be the difference between a call and a closed tab.
4. Do your photos show your actual business?
Photography is where many pages quietly give themselves away. Stock images of a smiling call centre tell a visitor nothing about you, and plenty of people can spot a stock photo on sight.
- Check that the photos are yours. Your shopfront, your van, your workshop, your actual team.
- Check that they show the work, not just the people. Before-and-after shots, finished jobs, the space a customer would walk into.
- Check that they look real, not perfect. A clear phone photo of genuine work often reassures more than a flawless image that could belong to anyone.
You do not need dozens of photos of the same corner. A handful of honest, specific images can carry this proof on their own.
5. Can a customer see where you are and how to reach you?
A real business exists somewhere and can be contacted. An About page that hides both raises a question you do not want raised.
- Check for a location. A full address if you have premises, or a clearly stated service area if you travel to customers.
- Check for a direct way to reach a person, a phone number or email, not only a lonely contact form.
- Check that the details match everywhere else, the same business name, address, and phone across your site and your listings. Consistency here can quietly support how confidently others treat you as legitimate.
A real page for a real business does two jobs at once
The Five Proofs are not a marketing exercise. They are the same things a careful customer would try to confirm before trusting you, written down where that customer, and the search results that describe you, can find them. People and credibility, history and honest scale, real credentials, real photos, and a real way to reach you. Walk your own About page through the five proofs and mark each one as present or missing. The gaps you find are usually the easiest, most honest improvements you can make, because you are not inventing anything. You are simply showing what was already true.