Your About Page Is Costing You Clients: What Buyers Actually Check

Your About Page Is Costing You Clients: What Buyers Actually Check

For most businesses the About page is a formality. For a consultant, an expert, or any practice where the product is a person, it's where the decision gets made.

And it's usually the weakest page on the site, because it gets written as an origin story when the visitor came to run a background check.

What the visitor is actually doing

Someone on your About page is not curious about you. They are managing risk.

They're deciding whether hiring you is safe, and specifically whether it's safe for them. When someone brings you into an organization they are lending you their credibility. If you're wrong, or slow, or unimpressive in front of their boss or their client or a judge, that lands on the person who recommended you.

So they're checking three things, in this order:

1. Can this person do the work?
2. Can this person defend the work? Under questioning, in a meeting, against a skeptic.
3. Has anyone else already trusted them with this?

Those are three different questions, and most About pages answer only the first, usually by asserting it.

The gap between doing and defending

This distinction is worth sitting with, because it explains a lot of stalled inquiries.

Work samples prove you can do the thing. They don't prove you can stand behind it when someone challenges it, and for a lot of professional work that second capability is what's actually being purchased.

I saw this clearly in an audit of an expert witness practice. His demonstration exhibits were genuinely excellent, better than most of his competitors'. But an attorney hiring an expert is deciding whether that person survives cross-examination, and nothing on the site spoke to it. No credentials, no testimony history, no statement of availability for deposition. The exhibits proved he could do the analysis. They said nothing about whether he could defend it on a stand, and those are different purchases.

Whatever the equivalent is in your field, that's the thing your About page is probably missing. Not evidence of skill. Evidence of standing.

What belongs on the page

A photograph of you. Not a logo, not an illustration, not a stock image of a team. Anonymity reads as risk on a page whose entire job is establishing that a real person is accountable.

Your name, prominently. Solo practices hide behind "we" constantly. It's meant to look established and it reads as evasive. If it's you, say it's you.

Specific qualifications with numbers attached. Not "extensive experience." The degree, the certification, the license, the year you started, how many of these you've done. Anything a person could check.

Where you did the work before. Prior employers, prior roles, prior institutions. If you spent a decade somewhere before going independent, that decade is your strongest evidence.

Evidence of standing. The field-specific version of question two. Testimony history, published work, speaking, board positions, professional memberships, licensure. Something that shows other professionals treat you as a peer.

Availability and constraints. How you engage, what you take on, what you don't. "I take a limited number of cases" is genuine scarcity that also signals you're not desperate, which is a thing buyers notice.

What doesn't belong, or belongs elsewhere

The journey narrative. How you found your calling, the moment you decided to go independent, what your grandfather taught you about hard work. This is the default content of About pages and it answers a question the visitor did not ask. One sentence of it can add warmth. Six paragraphs displace everything above.

Values statements. "We believe in integrity, transparency, and putting clients first." Every competitor says this, so it distinguishes nothing and costs you the space where a credential could sit.

Your philosophy of the work. Genuinely interesting to a client who has already hired you. Not what a stranger is scanning for.

None of this is bad writing. It's misplaced. It's what someone reads once they've decided you're credible and want to like you, which happens after the check, not during it.

The scannability problem

One structural note. Nobody reads this page top to bottom on the first pass. They scan it for the specific fact they're checking, and if scanning fails they leave rather than read carefully.

Which means a wall of well-written prose containing all the right credentials can still fail. If your certification is in the fourth sentence of the third paragraph, it isn't findable.

Break the facts out. A short credential block, a list, a clear heading. Prose for the parts that build warmth, structure for the parts being verified.

The test

Give your About page to someone who has never heard of you and ask them to answer three questions in thirty seconds: What is this person qualified to do? What proves it? Has anyone hired them before?

Thirty seconds, because that's roughly what you get. If they can't answer all three, the page is doing something other than its job.

Most About pages I audit fail question three completely and answer question one only by assertion. Both are fixable in an afternoon, and neither requires you to be more qualified than you already are. It requires you to say so.

Related: where this page belongs in the overall structure, how to build proof before your first client, and a real audit that found exactly this problem. If you'd like yours reviewed, the audit is $99.