How to Build a Link-Worthy About Page

There is a specific page on every business website that quietly earns backlinks while nobody's looking, and a version of the same page on most business websites that earns none. The difference isn't design or copywriting talent. It's a set of concrete structural choices that either give journalists, bloggers, and researchers a reason to link — or don't.

That page is the About page. And it is, statistically, the second-most-linked-to page on most sites after the homepage. Which means the version of your About page currently live is either doing quiet SEO work every month or wasting one of the highest-leverage pieces of real estate you own.

This post is about what makes the difference. It is not a copywriting guide — there are plenty of those. It's a structural guide, because the reason your About page isn't earning links is almost never that the prose is bad. It's that the page doesn't contain the specific things a person writing an article about your industry needs to cite.

Why About pages get linked in the first place

Understanding why someone links to an About page tells you what to build. There are exactly four reasons, and they cover roughly 95 percent of every organic About-page link ever earned:

1. To cite a company's founding story or origin claim. A journalist writing about "companies founded during the 2020 pandemic" needs somewhere to link when they mention yours. That link goes to whichever page contains the founding date, location, and story — usually the About page.

2. To attribute a specific claim to a specific person. When a writer quotes your CEO's opinion on an industry trend, they need to link the CEO's name to their bio. If the About page has a real bio section with named people, it becomes the destination. If it says "our team," the link goes elsewhere — often to the person's LinkedIn instead, which is a link you don't get to keep.

3. To reference a milestone, statistic, or claim about the business. "According to their About page, they've processed 50 million transactions" — that's a link. It only happens if the number is actually on the page.

4. To validate the company exists as a real entity. Roundup posts, "best of" lists, and directory-style articles frequently link to About pages purely as proof-of-existence. They want the reader to be able to confirm the company is real.

Every structural recommendation that follows comes from optimising for those four link types. If your page can be cited for all four, it will earn links passively for as long as the site exists.

The nine structural elements

A link-worthy About page contains nine specific elements, arranged in a specific rough order. This isn't a template — it's a checklist. The prose around each element is yours to write.

1. A one-sentence lead that describes what the company does in plain terms. This becomes the sentence that gets quoted when someone summarises your company. Make it quotable. "We build accounting software for freelance designers" beats "We're on a mission to empower the creative economy through purpose-built financial tooling."

2. A founding date, in the first paragraph. "Founded in 2021" or "Started in March 2023." Not "recently" or "in the last few years." A specific date is the difference between being citable and not.

3. A founding location. City, state, country. This matters more than most founders think — journalists writing region-specific pieces need this to include you.

4. The founding story, in 3–4 paragraphs. Not a manifesto. The specific problem the founders were trying to solve, what they tried first that didn't work, and why the current approach exists. Origin stories are the single most-linked-to type of About-page content because they give writers something concrete to quote.

5. Named founders and key team members, with real bios. Full name, role, and a two-to-three-sentence bio that establishes why this person is qualified to be doing this work. A photo helps but isn't essential. What matters is that when a journalist quotes your CEO, they have a page to link the name to.

6. At least three specific numbers about the company. Customer count, transactions processed, cities served, years in business, funding raised, team size — some combination. Numbers get quoted. Vague growth language does not. "Over 50,000 businesses use our software in 47 countries" is a link; "we've grown rapidly" is not.

7. A mission or values section — but concrete. Skip the "empower / disrupt / transform" language. What is the specific belief that shapes how you build the product? "We think most SaaS pricing is designed to punish small customers, so we cap our prices at 2 percent of revenue" is a linkable value. "We value transparency" is not.

8. A press or media section, if you have any coverage at all. Even one or two logos. This is one of the strongest social-proof signals for other journalists deciding whether to cite you. If you've never been mentioned, put a short "in the news" section anyway with your own major announcements linked out.

9. Contact information, including a real address if you have one. Companies without physical addresses on their About pages are treated as harder to verify. A P.O. box is fine. A city is fine. "Distributed globally" is not.

Missing any three of those, and the page is roughly half as linkable. Missing five, and it might as well not exist.

The specific mistakes that kill About pages

Beyond missing elements, four specific mistakes turn otherwise-decent About pages into ones that never get cited:

Photo-only team sections. A row of headshots with names underneath, no bio, no title, no context. Reads as decoration. Writers can't cite decoration.

Vague founding narratives. "The founders saw a gap in the market and decided to fill it." No specifics, no dates, no early-days detail. This is unlinkable. Nobody wants to quote a stock phrase.

Placeholder mission language. "We believe in the power of X to change Y." Every company website has some version of this. It signals corporate template, not real story. Skip it or replace it with something specific enough to argue with.

No dates anywhere on the page. Founded when? Milestones achieved when? Team formed when? A page without dates is a page that reads as timeless — which sounds like a compliment but is actually a citation problem. Journalists need to timestamp things.

The dedicated founder-story sub-page pattern

For sites that take this seriously, there's a second-order pattern worth knowing: split the founder story off into its own dedicated page, linked prominently from the About page.

The reason is that founder stories are one of the most linkable types of business content on the open web — journalists love them, industry blogs syndicate them, LinkedIn posts reference them. When the story sits inside the About page, all those links point at /about. When it sits at /story or /founding or /how-we-started, that becomes its own indexed page with its own accumulated link equity.

This is worth doing if your founding story is genuinely interesting — if it involves an unusual pivot, a specific origin problem, a technical breakthrough, or anything else a journalist might want to cover in isolation. If the story is "we noticed a gap and started a company," don't bother — the dedicated page will just be a weaker version of the About page.

What the modern About page doesn't need

There are three sections most templated About pages include that add nothing:

A "values" grid with icons. Six little icons with words like "Innovation," "Integrity," "Excellence." This has been visually shorthand for "generic corporate page" since roughly 2015. If your values are worth stating, state them in prose that could only apply to your company.

A timeline of company milestones nobody outside the company cares about. "2022 — First office move." "2023 — Reached 10 employees." Nobody's linking to this. If you're doing a timeline, populate it with milestones that make external sense: first customer, first major press mention, first product launch, first funding round.

Stock photography of "diverse teams collaborating." Better to have no photos than obviously stock ones. Real photos of real people, or nothing.

The technical layer

Beyond content, three technical choices raise an About page's link-worthiness measurably:

Add Organization schema (JSON-LD). Include founder names, founding date, founding location, address, social profiles, and any awards. This helps search engines understand the entity behind the site, which raises the odds of appearing in knowledge panels and being surfaced as an authoritative source.

Make sure named people have their own on-page anchors. Each team-member section should have an ID (<section id="founder-jane-doe">), so external writers can link directly to that person's bio. This turns one linkable page into N linkable page fragments.

Keep the URL as /about. Not /about-us, not /company/about, not /who-we-are. /about is the pattern journalists guess when they can't find the link — meaning it accumulates traffic that shouldn't otherwise reach you.

An hour with your existing About page

A concrete audit you can run right now, in roughly an hour:

1. Open your About page and read it out loud.
2. Count the number of specific dates. Should be at least three. If zero, that's the first fix.
3. Count the number of named individuals with real bios. Should be at least one, ideally three or more. If zero, that's the second fix.
4. Count the number of specific numeric claims about the business. Should be at least three. If zero, this is the third fix.
5. Read the "mission" section. Ask whether it could apply, word-for-word, to a competitor. If yes, it's generic — rewrite it with specifics or delete it.
6. Check whether the URL is /about. If not, add a redirect from /about to whatever the current path is.
7. Add or extend the Organization JSON-LD schema.

Sites that fix all seven of those, in one focused session, typically see linked-mentions rise measurably over the following six months — not from any promotional push, but purely because the page is now something a writer can actually cite.

The deeper point

About pages are unusual in the content ecosystem: they're one of the very few pages you can write once, then benefit from indefinitely, with no ongoing publishing effort. The compounding is entirely front-loaded. A good About page written in year one is still earning links in year five.

The founders who understand this treat the About page as a strategic asset, not a settings-page-adjacent formality. They spend real time on it. They update it when milestones happen. They add named team members as the team grows. They treat every quotable claim about the company as a candidate to include on this specific page, because they know that's where the citation will land.

If your About page reads like it was written in an afternoon by someone who wanted to check "About page" off a launch checklist, it's leaking backlinks every month. The fix is one focused rewrite, informed by the checklist above, and then leaving it alone to do its work.