How to write an about page that actually sells

Your about page is not about you

Most about pages start at the beginning. The year, the founder, the dream. That is not what the reader came for. She is standing there with her phone, working out whether your food matches the hunger she has right now.

That does not mean your story is irrelevant. It only starts working once the simple questions are answered. First what you sell, for whom and where. Then why you.

Four things get muddled here. They are related, but they do not do the same job.

Start with the description. It is the shortest and therefore the hardest. Once it stands, your about page is little more than the same content with air around it.

What always belongs in it

Wherever the text ends up, these five things are what a guest wants settled before anything goes in the basket. Leave one out and she fills the gap herself, usually wrongly.

• Your cuisine. Not just Italian, but Neapolitan pizza from a wood oven. Name the dish people come back for.
• Your atmosphere. Quiet and small, or loud and full. A guest who knows this is rarely disappointed.
• Your location. Street, neighbourhood and the landmark everyone measures you against. An old address or a stale set of opening hours drives people away faster than anything else.
• How it works. Collection, delivery, booking, or all three. Say how far out you drive.
• Who you are. One line about where you come from or what you trained in. The rest belongs on your about page.

Notice that passion, experience and authenticity are missing. Those words sit on so many restaurant sites that they carry no information any more. A wood oven, your mother's sauce and a street name do.

Start from the guests you already have

You cannot choose what to emphasise until you know who you are talking to. And you already know, because those people are ordering from you this week. The mistake is writing for the guest you wish you had.

Write down three things about your regulars.

• Who they are: age, with or without children, living here or working here.
• What they care about: speed, price, eating well, something they cannot make at home.
• How they order: late on a weekday evening, or on Saturday with the whole family.

You do not need a persona with an invented name attached. Two lines will do: who it is, and what they want from you on an average Tuesday evening.

How you differ from the place three doors down

The next question is why anyone picks you over the neighbour with almost the same menu. That difference does not have to be grand. It only has to be true and explainable in one sentence.

• A dish you make better or differently from everyone else in your area.
• Portions a whole family eats from, or a menu built deliberately around one person.
• A timing you actually keep: hot within twenty minutes, or still open past half ten.
• A cuisine that is rare here, or a diet you take seriously instead of treating as an afterthought.
• Ordering direct from you, with no commission coming off your margin.

Say your delivery addresses cluster in a residential area and you peak on Friday and Saturday. Then your description is not about your years in a fine-dining kitchen. It is about family portions arriving hot and on time, two streets away.

That same choice later decides what your photos show and which dishes sit at the top of your menu. One clear difference is worth more than five vague ones.

Get the core into two sentences

Only now do you write. Sentence one says what you sell and where. Sentence two says what the reader can do next. You need no more than that, and no more will fit in most of the boxes this text ends up in.

Put the words people actually type into that first sentence. Almost always that is the shape best [cuisine or dish] in [town or neighbourhood]. Not as a trick, but because it happens to be the clearest way to say what you are and where you sit.

Read it aloud. If you stumble, your reader stumbles too. That is how you keep it sharp.

• Short over complete. Whatever does not fit in two sentences belongs on your about page.
• No trade jargon and no expensive words. Write the way you would explain it at the counter.
• No superlatives you cannot back up. Best in the country says nothing, best pide in Overvecht can be checked.
• Put a button straight underneath. A description without an ordering button leaves the reader hunting.

These two sentences are your source. Everything that follows is a longer or shorter version of them, never a different story.

Photos do the work your sentences cannot

Text persuades slowly, a photo persuades at once. So your description stands or falls on the image next to it. One honest picture of your own plate does more than three paragraphs about freshness.

Stock imagery is spotted even by people who could not say why. They do not recognise the plate, and that quietly undermines the trust you are busy building.

• Your three best sellers, close up, in daylight next to a window.
• Your room as it looks on an ordinary evening, not cleared out for the camera.
• The people who work there, hands in the work rather than lined up for the lens.
• If you write about it, an old photo: the first site, the stall, the founders.

A short video works harder still on an about page: a walk through your room shows what a guest would otherwise only notice on arrival. Use those same photos on your Google Business Profile and your delivery page.

One restaurant, four channels

Your description ends up in more places than your own site. Each channel offers a different amount of room and serves a different purpose, so the length changes. The story does not.

Your about page

Here you do have room. Open with the two core sentences, so someone who reads only the first lines still knows where they are. Then build outwards with what binds people to a place: how you started, who is in the kitchen, where you buy.

Close with one clear step. Order, book or join the mailing list. Not all three at the same size, because then the reader picks none of them. You are free to explain that an order coming in directly costs you no commission. Guests appreciate the openness and your margin keeps more.

Google Business Profile

For many restaurants this is the busiest shop window they own, and most leave the text box empty. Put your cuisine, your neighbourhood and your biggest difference in it, in ordinary sentences. Only the first lines show before someone has to expand it, so lead with what matters.

A run of keywords will not help you and reads badly. Reuse the same text on TripAdvisor and on comparable guides.

Thuisbezorgd, Uber Eats and Deliveroo

A delivery platform gives you almost no room for a story about your restaurant, but plenty of room per dish. That is where your gain sits, because that is the text someone reads at the moment of choosing.

• Name the ingredient that makes the difference, not just the name of the dish.
• Write so that someone can taste it: crisp, smoked, slow-cooked, straight from the wood oven.
• Say how many people it feeds, especially for platters and family portions.
• Keep the names identical to the ones on your own site, or it reads as a different restaurant.

Social media

Your bio gives you one line. Spend it on what you sell and where you are, with the link to your own ordering page underneath. In your posts the tone can loosen up, as long as someone who has never heard of you can still tell what kind of place this is.

Why some about pages stay with you

Read ten about pages from places you rate yourself. The ones you remember almost always do one of these five things, rarely all five at once.

1. They say where it started. A market stall, a home kitchen, a recipe that travelled. Origin gives the reader something to hold on to.
2. They zoom in on one thing. The dough that proves for two days, the sauce made fresh every morning. Concrete craft convinces far better than the word quality.
3. They show what they value. Buying locally, wasting less, staff who stay. Values only work when they are visible in what you do.
4. They sound like a person. A page that talks the way the owner talks reads faster than a page that sounds like a brochure.
5. They show the climb. From one site to two, from collection to delivery. People are glad to back someone who built it themselves.

What they share is that each gives away something that belongs only to them. A competitor cannot copy that, and a price comparison cannot cancel it out.

And they all end somewhere. An about page without a button is a good story that goes nowhere.

What to do on Monday

This is an hour of work, not a project. Set a timer and write the first version. You can always polish it later, but publishing is what counts.

A description is never finished. Your menu changes, your guests change and your restaurant changes with them. But the version that is online today does more work than the perfect version still sitting in your head.