As part of your website’s reputation, Google uses two sentences from either your Google Business Profile (GBP) description or your ‘About Us’ page to describe what your website is about.
Where can you see the text Googlebot picked up from one of these places?
Google’s ‘About the source’ information
If you search Google for your company name plus location, one of the top results will be a link to your website. Click on the ellipsis to the right of your website’s URL and click More about this page.
On the resulting Google reputation page, you will see an ‘About the source’ section with a subsection ‘In their own words.’ If you don’t see the subsection, read on.
Googlebot will not find a reference site for your website unless your website happens to have a Wikipedia or encyclopedia page.
Where Googlebot looks for information
If your website does not have an ‘About Us’ page or Googlebot cannot find what it considers to be a site description on your ‘About Us’ page or anywhere else on your site, the fallback will be the first two sentences of your Google Business Profile (GBP) business description.
However, if your organization has more than one GBP page, there’s no way to control which page’s description Googlebot will pull from.
If your organization has neither a GBP page nor an About Us page on your website, the ‘In their own words’ section may be missing altogether. In other words, Googlebot has not found a suitable website description on your website.
‘About Us’ page structure and opening sentences
Regardless of what Googlebot has found (or not found), if your website does not have an About Us page, you should consider adding one.
On one of the Google Search Help pages, Google explains how to structure ‘About Us.’ Here is an excerpt:
- Google will try to find your site’s description on an About Us page. To help Google find the description:
- Create an About Us page on your site with about-us in the URL.
- Include the description of your site on that page. The description must be in English and crawlable.
- Link to that page with the text “about us.”
- Include hints like an “About us” header above your site’s description.
Your website’s ‘About Us’ page should begin with an H1 heading with only the words “About Us.”
The first sentence of your ‘About Us’ page should be a description of your website rather than a description of your business. The second sentence should describe what your company does, how long you’ve been doing it, and who your audience is.
After the first two sentences, you can add information about the company founders, your mission, etc.
The ‘About Us’ page should have a link from the website’s menu or footer with the exact text, “About Us.”
The page should have as close to the following structure as possible:
URL: https://www.company.com/about-us
About Us
Company.com is a website about [helpful information available on your website]. For [X] years, we have been providing [products or services] to [your audience].
[Company] was founded in [year] by [person or people]. Our goal is to provide [value we provide].
[Anything else you want to add].
After you add or update your About Us page, it may take a couple of weeks to update the ‘In their own words’ subsection.
A more important part of your site’s reputation is the entries in the ‘Web results about the source’ subsection. We’ll cover that in a future post.
