Everyone’s got one…we’re talking about ‘About Us’ pages.
Not all web pages are created equally. From an SEO perspective, we’ve always been ready to chalk up ‘About Us’ pages for all but useless. In fact, we feel that ‘About Us’ pages are like name tags, people feel compelled to wear them, but nobody really reads it. Despite all of this, we wanted to see if ‘About Us’ pages really do have a value. Surely, for instance, these pages might have a value in terms of branding or communication, right?
So…we put ‘About us’ pages to the test. To do so, we looked at data for ‘About Us’ pages across ten clients that represent different languages and industry verticals for a period of 3 months. In order to establish ‘importance,’ we calculated total ‘About Us’ pageviews and compared this amount to site-wide pageviews.
Here are the results:
| Site | Industry | Total Pageviews | ‘About Us’ Pageviews | % Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ‘About Us’ Pageviews vs Site-wide Pageviews | ||||
| 1 | eCommerce (B2B) | 3131 | 2 | 0.63% | 2 | Industrial | 263,787 | 361 | 0.011% |
| 3 | IT / Software | 1,111 | 7 | 0.06% |
| 4 | Tourism / Hospitality | 66,945 | 43 | 0.06% |
| 5 | Community Site | 150,734 | 10 | 0.0066% |
| 6 | Professional Services | 1,967 | 134 | 0.068% |
| 7 | Healthcare | 3,725 | 28 | 0.75% |
| 8 | Sustainable Energy | 263,787 | 361 | 1.1% |
| 9 | Event Organizers | 6,121 | 451 | 74% |
| 10 | eCommerce apparel | 217,562 | 1,052 | 0.48% |
Poor ‘About Us’ Pages
While we’ll concede that looking at just ten websites might not mean ‘About Us’ pages are useless, we do feel confident in saying that these pages tend to offer very little value…at least in terms of attention. In observing the data from the table above, we see that some of the ‘About Us’ pages didn’t even get 1% of total pageviews. Needless to say, that’s not great.
With that being said, we don’t want to be too hard on the poor, little ‘About Us’ pages of the world. These pages can still provide some value, such as:
- Create a fun experience through humour or originality
- Give a website a bit of personalty
- Establish transparency, and build trust
- Give an indication of who to complain to when things go wrong
All in all, we have this to conclude: ‘About Us’ pages probably aren’t worth losing sleep over. Yes, these pages may provide some benefits in terms of communication, but they appear to have little value in terms of visitor engagement. After all, we feel it’s better to ‘show’ who you are throughout a website as opposed to simply ‘explaining.’
Have something to say about ‘About Us’ pages? Drop us a comment and let us know!