Every professional blog has an About page. Almost none of them are doing the job they should be doing, for readers or for search engines.

Every professional blog or website has an About page. Almost none of them are doing the work they should be doing.

Most About pages read like apologies. They are vague about what the writer actually does, cautious about making claims, and written as if the reader already knows why they should care. “Welcome to my blog. I am passionate about communication and helping people grow.” A first time visitor learns almost nothing from that sentence, and Google learns even less.

What the About Page Actually Is

The About page is the one place on your site where you can be completely explicit about who you are, what you cover, who you write for, and why that intersection matters. That combination of clarity is exactly what search engines reward and what first time visitors need in order to decide whether to stay.

In Korea, the About page is also a Naver asset. InternetTrend puts Naver at 62.9% of domestic web search for 2025, Google at 29.6%; even StatCounter, which flatters Google, has them level. The page that answers “who is this” has to be findable on both.

Start with what you do and who you do it for. Not “I am a writer interested in career topics” but “I write practical career communication advice for university students and early career professionals navigating Korean and international job markets.” That sentence tells a visitor in ten seconds whether they are in the right place. It also contains the specific language Google uses to understand what your site is about.

Why It Is an SEO Asset

Individual blog posts earn traffic for specific searches. The About page establishes the topical authority that makes all your other pages rank better. When Google clearly understands your niche from your About page, it becomes more confident in surfacing your content for searches across the entire area you cover. Most bloggers treat the About page as an afterthought. It is one of the highest return pages on the site.

Use the table as a template. Each row is a question a first time visitor is silently asking, and each one is also something a search engine is trying to work out. Google says so directly in its guidance on helpful content: “We strongly encourage adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it,” and it asks whether those bylines lead to background about the author and “the areas they write about” (Google Search Central). On a personal site, that background lives on the About page. Of the qualities Google says it looks for, experience, expertise, authority and trust, it calls trust the most important, and trust is exactly what a vague About page fails to give.

None of this is new, which is the reassuring part. The Stanford Web Credibility guidelines, drawn from three years of research with over 4,500 people, include “Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site” and “Make it easy to contact you” (Stanford Web Credibility Project). Readers were checking for a real person long before anyone worried about ranking. The About page is where you pass that check once, so every post you link from it does not have to pass it again. The same logic shapes a good three sentence bio: the reader wants to know who you are before deciding whether to believe you.

One About Page, Rewritten in Seoul

Here is how it plays out. Picture Lee Minji, an independent HR consultant in Seoul who helps foreign companies hire their first team in Korea. She is good at the work and gets most clients through referrals. Her English site has six solid posts on Korean labour contracts and hiring timelines, and an About page that opens like this: Hello, and thank you for visiting. I am passionate about people and believe every company deserves great talent. It is warm, and it tells a founder in Singapore searching for help hiring in Korea nothing at all. It does not say Korea. It does not say hiring. It does not say who she works with.

The habit behind that opening is a Korean one, and it is worth naming. Korean company sites traditionally open with a 인사말, the greeting from the CEO that thanks the visitor, states a vision and promises sincerity. It is a courtesy, and in Korean it reads as one. Translated into an English About page, it reads as vagueness, because English readers and English search both expect the facts first and the warmth after. Minji kept the warmth and moved it to the end. Her new first line names the job, the client and the country. Her second line gives twelve years and a number of placements. Her third links to her guide on Korean hiring timelines.

The Korean search side is moving the same way. Naver said its AI Briefing feature passed 20 percent of total searches in December 2025, and for health and public service queries it describes the feature as aggregating information “from trusted and approved institutions” (The Korea Times, December 2025). As more answers arrive as summaries, being clearly identifiable as a source matters more, not less, and the About page is where you become identifiable. If you publish on both platforms, Naver Blog vs WordPress covers how the two audiences differ, and the 소개 section of a Naver Blog deserves the same rewrite.

How to Write It

Write about your background in terms that connect directly to the reader’s problem. Not “I have a postgraduate degree in Communications” but “I have spent years teaching professional writing to students preparing to enter competitive job markets in Korea and internationally. I know exactly where the writing breaks down.” The credential matters less than the relevance. Include internal links to your three or four strongest posts, and link to the work that best represents you, not just the most recent pieces.

The third pass does the most work. Passionate, dedicated and experienced are words every competitor also uses, so they carry no information. Twelve years, forty placements and a named client type are things a reader can check, which is why they build trust. If you are stuck on the one sentence in the second pass, the Mission and Vision Builder walks you through six questions that end in exactly that line. When the draft is done, paste it into Copy Check for an honest score and the biggest gap still left.

Treat the About page as the centre of your digital presence, not a footnote to it. Your LinkedIn profile, your bio at events and your email signature should all point back to it and say the same thing in fewer words, which is the point of a good LinkedIn summary too. And write its first line the way you would write a headline: it may be the only line some visitors read.

Write in first person and in your actual voice. Formal third person bios work in conference programmes. On a personal blog, they create distance precisely where you need proximity. The About page is where readers decide whether they trust you enough to keep coming back. That trust comes from specificity and voice, not from credentials listed in the third person.

→  The Writing Lab covers the mechanics of professional writing and content strategy in detail. If you want structured help building a site that works, the Work With Us page covers what that looks like.

If you want practical tools to sharpen how you communicate professionally, the communication tools on this site are a useful starting point.

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