What Should a Small Business About Us Page Include?

A plumber I talked to last year had an About page that read "We are a family-owned business dedicated to providing excellent service to our valued customers," with a stock photo of a man in a hard hat who had never set foot in his service area. It wasn't lying exactly, it just said nothing. After building custom websites for small service businesses for over 20 years, I've found the About page is one of the most skipped-over pages on a site, and also one of the few pages where a visitor is actively trying to decide if they trust you enough to pick up the phone.

What Should a Small Business About Us Page Include?

Six things earn their place: who you are, how long you've been doing this, what you actually do (in plain terms, not jargon), what makes your approach different, a real photo, and a clear way to contact you. That's the whole list. Everything else, the mission statement boilerplate, the stretched claims, the stock imagery of people who've never worked for you, is filler that a visitor skims past on the way to deciding whether you're real and whether you're worth calling.

Why Does an About Us Page Matter for a Small Business?

Because it's one of the few pages on a service business site where a visitor has already decided they're interested and is now deciding whether they trust you specifically, not just whether you exist. BrightLocal's local business discovery and trust research found that 36% of consumers trust a business's own website as a source when researching a local business, behind only Google and Google Maps, and visiting the website at all is already a sign of higher intent than someone just skimming a search results page. Someone who clicks through to your About page isn't idly browsing. They're close to calling, and a vague or generic page is a real chance to lose them right there.

What Makes a Good About Us Page Different From a Bad One?

The difference almost always comes down to specificity. Generic language is a tell that the page was written to fill space rather than to actually introduce the business, and visitors pick up on that faster than most owners expect.

How Do You Write an About Page Without Sounding Generic?

Start with a fact instead of an adjective. "I've installed roofs on over 400 homes across this county since 2011" tells a visitor something concrete. "We're dedicated to quality craftsmanship" tells them nothing they couldn't find on a competitor's site with a word swapped out. I see this constantly with roofing companies rewriting an old builder-template About page, the original copy is so generic it could belong to any contractor in the country, and the fix isn't a better sentence, it's specific, real detail that only applies to that one business.

A short personal note works better than a corporate one for almost every small service business. If you started the company after years working for someone else, say that. If a specific job or client problem is why you do things a certain way now, mention it briefly. You don't need a full origin story, just enough that the page sounds like one real person talking, not a brand voice borrowed from a company ten times your size.

Does the About Page Affect SEO, Not Just Trust?

Yes, more than most owners realize. Google's own guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content describes E-E-A-T, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust, as a mix of factors its systems weigh when evaluating a page, and says plainly that of those, "trust is most important." The same page recommends that authorship and who is behind a site be clear to visitors, and it specifically warns that fabricated creator profiles, invented names, fake credentials, AI-generated headshots, make a page less trustworthy to both users and Google's own automated systems. A real About page with a real name and a real photo is a small, concrete way to answer exactly what that guidance is asking for. A stock photo and a copied mission statement do the opposite.

What Should a Service Business Include That a Retail Store Shouldn't Worry About?

Licensing and insurance information matters more for trades than for most other small businesses, and the About page is a natural place for it, alongside your service pages rather than instead of them. A med spa's About page benefits more from the practitioner's training and certifications than from a company history. A restaurant's About page usually does better leaning into the story, who's cooking, what the place is about, since the "can I trust this business" question there is less about credentials and more about whether the food and atmosphere match what they're looking for. The right emphasis depends on what your specific visitor is actually trying to decide before they commit.

How Often Should You Update Your About Us Page?

Whenever something on it actually changes, which is less often than the rest of your site but still worth checking once or twice a year. If you've added a certification, moved locations, or the "5 years in business" line has quietly become 9, update it. An outdated About page is a small but real credibility problem, since a visitor who notices a stale fact starts to wonder what else on the site hasn't been kept current. I cover the broader version of this question, what should get checked and how often, in how often you should update your business website. The About page specifically should also get a look any time your team changes, since a photo or bio for someone who no longer works there undermines the exact trust the page is supposed to build.

What Should You Do Next?

Pull up your current About page and read it as if you were a stranger deciding whether to call. If it reads like it could belong to any business in your industry, it needs real specifics: your name, how long you've been doing this, a genuine photo, and one honest sentence about why you do the work the way you do. That's a short page, often shorter than owners expect, and it does more for trust than any amount of polished-sounding filler.

If your current site's About page, or the rest of it, is still running on a builder template with placeholder copy nobody ever replaced, request a free mockup and I'll show you what a custom-coded site built around your real business, not a generic template, could look like.