We’ve done thousands of videos and websites for our clients, and here’s what we’ve found: possibly the most valuable page on your site is your “About Us” page.

That’s right. Your About Us page might even be more important than your homepage. Viewers that are ready to make a purchase tend to go from your homepage, to your About page, and from there they move to your Contact Us page to find out how they can get in touch with you.

This makes the About Us page your point of real conversion.

How does this work? Well, there are 3 stages users typically go through when making a conversion: they want to know you, then they want to like you, and finally, they want to trust you.

On your homepage, people get to know you, and sometimes even like you. But if they take the extra step to go to your About page, they are often looking to trust you. They want to know who you are — we buy from people we trust.

We’ve seen lots of companies that spend hundreds of hours with their web development team crafting the perfect homepage. They may even have a great overview video. But their About Us page is just a quick resume or a few paragraphs on the company’s history.

No offense, but a page stuffed with history likely won’t generate many conversions.

What they want is your story. Now, before you spend countless hours crafting your perfect About Us page, here are three ways to streamline the process, so you can maximize the impact of your story:

Understand your customers, and make the About Us page relate to their stories.

Before you write an About Us page, take some time and think about your ideal user — the person that would come to your About page looking for reasons to trust you. Try to understand their story, and then put everything about your company in that context.

Why is this so important? Well, say you’re at an event and you meet someone new. As you get to know them, you don’t immediately share your entire story. You share things about you that relate to your new friend. Things like “Oh, that’s one of my favorite albums, too” or “You have a son? I have two daughters”.

Now, if you can take this concept, and center your About Us page’s story towards the context of your customer, you’re going to have a stronger page.

Start with your “why”

Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why is this important to your users? Things like “I do (insert your business’s job) so you don’t have to”. People want to know your “why”. They want to know what you’re about, and why you want to make their lives easier through a product or service.

Tell your story in chunks

It’s very easy to overload your About Us page with paragraph after paragraph of detailed history into your company’s core, but most users can’t (and won’t) digest that. You want to break up the story and make it easy for the viewer to take in and understand.

Let’s go back to our new friend analogy. When you’re just getting to know someone, do you share a 30 minute monologue on your deepest desires and fears? We hope not! Most likely, you are sharing chunks of relevant information to your new friend, taking care to make your personal stories relevant to the conversation.

This is what users want from your About Us page. They want to take in chunks of information, piece by piece. It will keep them on the page longer, and the longer they spend reading your content, the more likely they are to trust you.

Once they become a customer and have established trust with your brand, they’ll remember your story. And people buy stories.