Your About page matters more than your Services page
I am going to say something that most service-business owners do not want to hear: the page you have spent the least time on is the page that decides whether you get hired. It is not your Services page. It is your About page. I have watched this pattern for years across small marketing agencies, accountants, coaches, and solo consultants, and I have stopped being polite about it. When the about page vs services page question comes up, the honest answer is that visitors decide on About first, and only then do they bother to read what you offer. If your About page is a four-line bio in third person with a stock photo, you are losing work before the conversation starts — and you do not even know it.
The order people actually click in
Watch a session recording on any service-business site and you will see the same pattern. A visitor lands on the homepage, scrolls maybe halfway, and then — before they go anywhere near Services or Pricing — they click About. Not always. But often enough that anyone running a service business should care.
Why? Because hiring a service is hiring a person. The buyer is not really shopping for a "brand strategy package" or a "monthly bookkeeping plan". They are deciding whether they want you in their corner for the next six months. Services tells them what they get. About tells them who they get it from. And the second question matters more.
I have written before about which trust elements actually earn conversions, and the same logic applies here: trust comes before transaction, every single time. Your Services page assumes a relationship that your About page has not yet earned.
What a generic About page actually says
Here is the About page I see most often, written in some version of the same template:
Riin Aas is a marketing consultant with over ten years of experience helping businesses grow. She has worked with clients across SaaS, e-commerce, and professional services. Riin holds a degree in business administration and is passionate about helping companies achieve their goals.
You can read that paragraph three times and walk away knowing nothing about the person. No story. No opinion. No reason this work matters to them specifically. The photo is corporate. The voice is third person, as if a publicist wrote it. It is a CV pretending to be a page.
The visitor reads it, feels nothing, and clicks back. They do not call. They do not book. They go look at the next consultant on their list, who has the same generic bio, and eventually they hire whoever was cheapest or whoever a friend recommended. You were never really in the running.
"But my About page is just a bio"
Here is the objection I hear most: "My About page is fine — it has my background, my qualifications, my photo. What more do people want?"
What people want is to feel like they have met you. A bio does not do that. A bio is what goes on a conference badge. An About page on a service-business website has a different job: it has to bridge the gap between a stranger landing on your site and a stranger willing to email you about something they care about. That is a long way to travel in a few paragraphs.
What actually closes that gap, in my experience working with small service businesses:
- First person. Write "I", not your own name in third person. The third-person bio is a holdover from press releases and academic profiles. You are not issuing a press release. You are introducing yourself.
- One specific story about why you do this work. Not your full origin myth. One story. The accountant who got into this because her father's small business almost folded over a tax mistake. The marketing consultant who spent three years in-house at a startup and hated watching agencies waste the budget. One paragraph. Concrete.
- A photo where you look like a human. Not a corporate headshot with a grey backdrop and a forced smile. A photo where someone could imagine sitting across a table from you. Phone-camera quality is fine. Approachability beats polish.
- Optionally, a short video greeting. Sixty to ninety seconds, unscripted, recorded on whatever camera you have. It does more work than three paragraphs of text, because the visitor hears your voice and reads your face before they ever talk to you. A video greeting widget like Heyly handles this in about thirty seconds, but the same logic applies if you record a quick clip and embed it manually. The medium matters less than the fact that it exists.
If you want a meta-example of what I mean, Heyly's own About page is written this way on purpose — first person, specific reasoning, no corporate fog. It is not a perfect template, but it is honest about the choice.
What this looks like for consultants specifically
Consultants are the worst offenders, and I say that with affection because I have built sites for many of them. The trap is that consulting feels like a credentials business. You think the buyer wants to see your client list, your methodology, your years of experience, your framework with a clever name. So you put all of that on Services and you treat About as a formality.
But the buyer hiring a consultant is taking a real risk. They are letting a stranger into their business, sometimes into sensitive numbers and difficult internal politics. They want to know what kind of person you are before they care about your framework. Are you the type who will tell them hard truths, or the type who will charge a retainer and produce slides? They cannot tell from your Services page. They can only tell from how you write about yourself.
For consultants specifically, I have written more about trust patterns that work in the consulting space — the gist being that warmth on About earns the right to be precise on Services. Reverse the order and you sound like every other firm.
Where Services still matters
I am not saying Services does not matter. Of course it does. Once a visitor has decided they like you — and that decision happens fast, often unconsciously — they need to understand what working together actually looks like. Clear scope, clear expectations, clear pricing where possible. A vague Services page after a warm About page leaves the buyer confused.
The point is sequence and weight. About earns the conversation. Services structures it. If you flip the proportions and pour all your effort into Services while leaving About as a four-sentence afterthought, you are optimising the back half of a journey most visitors never start.
A small reframe
If you want to know whether your About page is doing its job, try this: ask a friend who has never met you to read it and then describe you in three sentences. If they can only say "marketing consultant with ten years of experience" — congratulations, you have a CV. If they can say "she clearly cares about small businesses, sounds direct, probably would not waste my time with fluff" — you have an About page.
Your About page is the closest your website ever gets to a handshake. Most people are shaking hands like they are filing a tax return — formal, brief, eyes on the desk. If you change one page on your site this quarter, change that one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should an About page be written in first person or third person?
First person, for almost every service business. Third person made sense when websites were built like brochures and someone else was theoretically writing about you — a publicist, a journalist, a marketing department. None of that applies to a solo consultant or small agency. When you write "Riin is a consultant who…" on your own site, every reader knows you wrote it yourself, which makes the third-person framing feel slightly dishonest. Writing "I" is warmer, shorter, and more direct. The only common exception is when there are genuinely several people in the firm and the page is written by a partner or team lead about the others, but even then the page often works better split into individual first-person bios.
How long should a service-business About page be?
Long enough to feel like a real introduction, short enough that nobody has to scroll three times to finish. In practice, that usually lands somewhere between 250 and 600 words for a solo professional, plus a photo and optionally a short video. The structure that works most consistently in my experience: one paragraph on what you do and who you do it for, one paragraph on why you do this work specifically (the personal angle), one paragraph on how you tend to work with clients. That is enough. More than that, and you start padding. Less, and the page does not earn the trust the visitor is looking for.
Do I need a video on my About page?
No, you do not need one. But it helps more than most other changes you could make, because video is the only medium that conveys voice, pace, and warmth at the same time. A visitor who watches sixty seconds of you talking has formed a stronger impression than they would from any amount of polished text. The common worry is that you have to look professional on camera — you do not. Unscripted, slightly imperfect, recorded in whatever room you happen to be in tends to outperform high-production video for service businesses, because the goal is connection, not broadcast. If video genuinely is not for you, a strong photo and well-written first-person text gets you most of the way.
What is the biggest mistake on About pages?
Treating the page as a formality. You can spot it instantly — the four-line bio, the stock photo, the bullet list of credentials, the page that reads like the back cover of a textbook. The mistake underneath the mistake is assuming that visitors come to About for information. They do not. They come for a feeling: is this someone I would want to work with? Information without warmth fails that test every time. If your About page is genuinely just a list of facts about you, it is not doing the job the page is on your site to do, regardless of how accurate or well-written those facts are.