Your About Page Could Be Killing Your SEO

We've all been there.

Your brand-new business website is live, and there's so much to do. Product pages, image uploads, snappy social posts and videos -- you're ready to check them off the list, one by one.

That About page you put together before launch? Well, it's a little wordy, and you're not totally thrilled with it, but you'll get to it in time. Until then, tweak it as needed.

Whether or not you ever doubled back to make sure that About page is clean and accurate might have a huge impact on the success of your business. If you did, great! You can rest easy knowing that prospective customers will learn something valuable before perusing your goods and services.

If not, well, there's a good chance your About page is serving merely as a time capsule that teaches present-day customers about the weeks and months you couldn't be bothered to check if a vital part of your site was outdated, riddled with errors or simply unfinished. And that's a lesson people aren't interested in sticking around for.

Here is a small sampling of About page flaws that we've come across in the recent past:

• A company that is willing to "bare the burden" of your digital-marketing efforts. (It's bear the burden.)

• A golf shop carrying all the latest must-have equipment of 2014. (It's 2022.)

• A seller of office products that knows "all to well" about the rigors of finding trustworthy office tech.

• A company that's been a leading distributor of paper goods "for more than 20 x." (Let x = years, perhaps?)

Google and other search engines rank websites by a variety of metrics, and while there is debate over how much emphasis is put on specific data like bounce rates, click-through rates and time on page (if any emphasis at all), the fact is a negative user experience raises red data flags that hurt search visibility.

It's also a fact that site users have a negative experience when they encounter a series of typos, grammar mistakes and word-usage errors. Same goes for information that is simply out of date. Visitors leave websites faster and more frequently and are much less likely to ever link to your site if they don't trust the credibility of your business content. And they certainly won't buy much.

The bottom line: Take a few minutes to check, if not rewrite and improve, your website's About page. From our experience, it's a prime spot for costly errors to hide. They could be sabotaging your hard work with SEO.