Did you know that the ‘About us’ page is probably the most visited page on your website apart from the Home page? This is true for most businesses in most industries and yet ‘About’ pages are often written as an afterthought or with no clear focus and intention.
Knowing how important your ‘About us’ page could be to your potential clients, what can you do to create a powerful page that keeps people reading and drives them to book an appointment?
Here are our top ten tips:
1. It’s not about you
It sounds counterintuitive but your ‘About’ page is less about you and your clinic and more about your clients. Knowing that it’s likely to be the second most visited page on your site, this is the perfect space to show potential clients that you understand what brought them to your website and you can help them overcome a challenge or meet a specific objective.
Ideally, a potential client should feel like you’re talking to them personally. Your ‘About’ page is a great place to highlight this connection.
2. Tell your story
That’s not to say you can’t or shouldn’t talk about your business or your personal story. Some of the most successful ‘About’ pages are all about telling the story of how the business came to be; a celebration of where you’ve come from to where you are now. The key is to make the story relatable to the reader. Why should they care? How does your story shape your attitude or the services you offer?
3. Stick with ‘About us’
Our advice is to keep your ‘About’ page as simple as possible. Businesses often try to be clever by renaming their ‘About’ page as ‘Our journey’, ‘Our ethos’ or similar but, in our experience, people prefer a ‘does what it says on the tin’ approach to ‘About’ pages. Call it ‘About’ or ‘About us’ and people will know what page to go to at a glance to find out more about your business.
4. Let your clients do the talking
Who are you more likely to trust, a business that raves about how good it is or a client that waxes lyrical about a product or service they’ve recently purchased? Most people are more likely to trust the latter.
The ‘About’ page is an ideal place to feature client testimonials. If you can include a photograph and full name of the person giving the testimonial that’s even better as it boosts the sense of authenticity.
5. Let the facts do the talking
It can be hard to strike the right balance between selling your services and sounding boastful. One way around this is to feature some indisputable facts on your ‘About’ page – this might be details of client-focused awards or accreditations, logos of professional bodies to which you belong, your years in business, number of clients seen to date, publications you’ve featured in and more.
6. Drop the jargon
The best ‘About’ pages have a human touch that brings out the authentic voice and personality of the brand. The best way to achieve this is to write conversationally. It’s especially important to drop any medical jargon or acronyms in favour of warm, easy to understand language. People want to feel respected and valued rather than being bamboozled with terminology they don’t understand.
7. Make it visually interesting
Bearing in mind that approximately 56% of web traffic now accesses the internet via mobile devices, it’s more important than ever to break up large amounts of text on a web page with visual elements that draw the eye as the reader scrolls through the content. ‘About’ pages are often unnecessarily text heavy, so we always work with our clients to explore how visual appeal can be added.
There are plenty of options. One popular ‘About’ page comes from search experts, Moz, who feature a timeline to highlight the company’s big achievements and milestones. Another acclaimed ‘About’ page comes from Yellow Leaf Hammocks and uses a mix of images, video, and large horizontal panels to walk the reader through the company’s story.
People typically love to see pictures on an ‘About’ page that help them connect with the business and make it feel familiar. This is especially effective if you want to encourage clients into a bricks and mortar premises like a clinic. If you can show your staff going about their day-to-day work or give glimpses inside your consulting rooms, this will help potential patients to feel like they already know what to expect when they step into your waiting room for the first time.
8. Ask your existing clients for their input
One of the key purposes of an ‘About’ page is to tell potential clients about what makes your business different and how it will meet their needs. To achieve this, you might want to try asking your existing clients what makes your clinic stand out for them. Is it a particular treatment? A specific service? Your opening hours? Your ethos? Your location? The ease of parking? Your honest advice?
With these insights, you can focus your copy on highlighting these points and how they benefit your clients.
9. Include your name, address and phone number
When it comes to local search engine optimisation (SEO), one of Google’s priorities is to help people searching for local services to find the most convenient and highly rated business that matches their needs. One of the signals that Google uses to do this is your business name, address and phone number (NAP). To get the most traction from your NAP, it should be featured prominently on your website and match how it’s listed on your Google My Business page and in other local directories.
Featuring your NAP on your About page will also ensure that potential clients know how to contact you and book an appointment even if they don’t go any further into the website.
10. Check and revise
Once the ‘About’ page is live, it’s important to keep an eye on Google Analytics to see how people are interacting with the page. For example, you will probably want to look at its bounce rate (the percentage of people who come into and leave your site from the ‘About’ page without going to any other pages) and the average time spent on the page. You can also look at the ‘Behaviour’ information to see where people go on your site after reading the ‘About’ page.
If you have a high bounce rate, for example, you will need to think about whether you’re doing enough to draw people further into your site. This can be achieved with calls to action, links to news stories or treatment pages, and other techniques.
Is your current About page giving the right message? Could you be doing more to make your About page resonate with potential clients? We can help with this (and your website at large). Call us at Cosmetic Digital on 0115 9140 640 to start a conversation.
