Insights · Copywriting
Copywriting · 5 min read
The About page is where a prospective client decides whether you are real, whether you are competent, and whether they can afford you. Most of them are written as autobiography. They should be written as evidence.
Let us begin by throwing something out. You will read, in a great many places, that the About page is "the second most visited page on any website." We went looking for the source of that claim and there isn't one. It traces back through blog posts to nothing at all. We will not be repeating it.
What we do have is better. The Nielsen Norman Group ran three rounds of research into how people use company information online — over 70 users observed in one-to-one testing, 100 websites tested and a further 65 reviewed — and produced 85 design guidelines from it. Their headline finding is worth reading twice:
"Users expect About Us sections to be clear, authentic, and transparent. They compare corporate content with third-party reviews to form a holistic opinion."
That second sentence is the one that matters. Your About page is not read in isolation. It is read alongside your Google reviews, your LinkedIn, and whatever else a suspicious person can find in four minutes. In one round of twenty sessions, researchers recorded participants using the word reviews more than forty times.
Your About page is therefore not a story. It is a corroboration exercise.
For anything sold business to business, the decision is slow and rarely made alone. Nielsen Norman describe B2B purchases as "rarely impulsive — most commonly, they are the result of a long, complex decision-making process" that "typically involve multiple people, across a corporate hierarchy and functional job roles." Buyers research for weeks or months, and they share what they find with colleagues for approval.
This has a direct implication most businesses miss. Someone is going to forward your About page to a person who has never heard of you, with the message what do you think of these? Write it for that second reader — the sceptic, arriving cold, looking for a reason to say no.
Nielsen Norman found that users come to About sections seeking "the organizations' purposes, where companies were located, their missions, values, and history, as well as how to contact them." In practice, four things do the work.
From the same body of research: "seeing a physical location and humans behind the product or service bolsters their trust that the business is a legitimate one."
A town. A county. A phone number that is answered. A named human being with a photograph that is unmistakably them and not a stock library. This sounds trivially obvious and is skipped constantly, usually by sole traders who feel a bit exposed putting their own name to things. That instinct is understandable and it is costing you work.
Northwestern University's Medill Spiegel Research Center studied how reviews influence purchasing and produced three findings that ought to change how you handle testimonials.
That last one is the interesting one. A wall of flawless five-star praise reads as curated, and people discount it. A page with five specific, imperfect, human testimonials is more persuasive than twenty immaculate ones.
Note also that reviews matter more as the risk rises. Spiegel found reviews lifted conversion by 190% for lower-priced items and 380% for higher-priced ones. If you sell something expensive to a cautious buyer, proof is not a nice addition. It is the mechanism.
On format: Nielsen Norman found testimonials most persuasive when they describe initial scepticism followed by confidence, and when they carry the author's job title and affiliation. "Great to work with — Sarah" is worth almost nothing. "I was not convinced we needed to rebuild rather than patch. Six weeks in, enquiries had doubled. — Sarah Nolan, Practice Manager, Nolan Dental, Navan" is worth a great deal.
This is the recommendation businesses resist most and the evidence for it is unusually strong. Across numerous Nielsen Norman usability studies, price is the number one information need on any website, including in B2B. Users abandoned sites in favour of competitors who showed cost, and described companies that concealed pricing as "evasive and untrustworthy."
Their summary of how hidden pricing is read: "If you have to ask… it's probably too expensive." Concealing the number gives "the impression that it is 'too scary' to be displayed."
You do not have to publish a rate card. A range, a starting figure, a typical project band — anything that lets a reader work out whether they are in the right shop. The enquiries you lose by publishing a range were never going to convert; the ones you lose by hiding it were.
The same research is scathing about funnelling everything through a sales conversation: it "gives the impression that the organization either has not figured out how the product works or does not want users to know this information."
Nielsen Norman on jargon, from their B2B trust research: "Complicated or jargon-filled writing can be perceived as written by someone who wants to sound intelligent but may not actually be intelligent, or with the intent to mislead customers."
There is experimental backing for this. Daniel Oppenheimer at Princeton ran five studies swapping simple words for needlessly complex ones in graduate applications, dissertation abstracts and translations of Descartes. The finding: writers who use long words unnecessarily are judged less intelligent, not more. His own summary — "write as simply and plainly as possible and it's more likely you'll be thought of as intelligent."
And before anyone objects that their audience is sophisticated: Nielsen Norman tested plain language with domain experts in science, technology and medicine and found "even highly educated online readers crave succinct information that is easy to scan." An IT manager, on IBM's own site: "It's got a whole lot of jargon and technical terms I'm not familiar with."
It usually reads something like: Founded in 2018, we are a passionate team of dedicated professionals committed to delivering excellence and building lasting relationships with our clients.
Apply the two tests. Would a competitor say the same? Yes. Would anyone ever claim the opposite — that they are dispassionate, undedicated, and interested only in brief relationships? No. It is therefore not information. It is throat-clearing, in the position of highest attention on the page.
Replace it with something only you could truthfully write. What you refuse to do. Who you turn away. The thing you got wrong once and changed because of it. Specificity is the only thing on an About page that cannot be copied by the business down the road.
An About page written as autobiography asks the reader to be interested in you. An About page written as evidence lets them conclude, on their own, that you are the safe choice. Only one of those wins work. Your vision, built to perform.
Nielsen Norman Group: About Us Information on Corporate Websites (2019), Great Summaries on About Us Pages, What B2B Designers Can Learn from B2C About Building Trust, B2B vs. B2C Websites, Pricing Information Gives B2B Sites a Competitive Advantage, Plain Language Is for Everyone Even Experts · Medill Spiegel Research Center, Northwestern University, How Online Reviews Influence Sales (2017) · Oppenheimer (2006), Applied Cognitive Psychology 20(2), DOI 10.1002/acp.1178 · Fogg et al. (2003), Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.
All sources verified live on 7 August 2026. The commonly repeated claim that the About page is the second most-visited page on a website has no traceable source and is not used here.
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