Most About Us pages are not stories. They are a founder's CV written in the first person plural. We started in 2018, with a passion, we had a dream, we grew, and today we serve hundreds of clients.
Nobody reads it. Not because the writing is bad, but because the story is not about the person reading it. A customer is not choosing between you and a competitor on whose history is nicer. They are trying to work out whether you understand their situation.
So the fix is not stylistic. It is about who the hero is.
First, this is not a positioning statement
People conflate the two and then write something weak in both. They differ by audience before they differ by form.
A positioning statement is an internal document. A formula. It tells your own team who you are for, what you solve, and how you differ. No customer reads it, and that is deliberate. How to write one is in how to write a brand positioning statement.
A brand story is something else. It is prose that gets read, said on a call, and told in the first minute of a video. Its only test is whether it still sounds true when spoken aloud to somebody sitting opposite you.
If yours say the same thing, one of them is wrong, and it is usually the story.
Why the founder story fails
Three reasons, all practical rather than philosophical.
First, dates are not useful information. That the company started in 2018 tells a customer nothing about whether it will solve their problem. The founding year matters in one case only, which is where the industry has a credible doubt about whether suppliers survive.
Second, passion is not differentiation. Every competitor uses the same word on the same page. What actually makes a brand different is the subject of what makes a brand different, and the short version is that it is not what you say about yourself.
Third, and this is the one that matters: a story with the founder as hero asks the customer to admire you. A story with the customer as hero asks for something much easier, which is that they recognise themselves in it.
The shape that works
Four moves, in this order, each one or two sentences.
- The situation. The customer's position before they met you, described in their detail rather than your vocabulary.
- What was already on offer. What should have solved it and did not, and why. This move builds the credibility, because it concedes something real.
- What you changed. Exactly one decision, not a feature list. What you do differently that addresses the reason above.
- The evidence. Something checkable. A number, a visible detail of how you work, or somebody you said no to.
The third move is the one that decides it, and it is the one that collapses into generality on most pages. We pay attention to detail is not a decision. We refuse to work with more than three clients a month is a decision.
The same story written both ways
| Move | The wrong way | The right way |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | We started in 2018 with a dream | You have paid three agencies and the site still brings nothing |
| Problem | We spotted a gap in the market | They all sold you hours, nobody sold you an outcome |
| Change | We offer an integrated service with passion | We agree one number before we start, and measure it |
| Evidence | Hundreds of clients trust us | If that number has not moved in ninety days we stop it ourselves |
Notice that the third column contains not one adjective about the brand. It is all about the customer or about a checkable decision. That is not a writing style, it is a choice about content.
The version a machine reads
There is a second copy of your story written for machines, it is the one that shows up in search, and most people do not realise it exists.
Google's documentation on Organization structured data says something surprising: "There are no required properties." Not one mandatory field. It recommends properties including name, description, logo, url, address, contact point and social profiles, notes that some of them help disambiguate your organisation from similar ones, and says logo affects which logo Google chooses to show in Search and in your knowledge panel.
The detail that matters here: the description property is defined as "A detailed description of your organization, if applicable", and the page sets no length limit and no rules about how it is written.
Read that honestly. Nobody will stop you writing a bad description. There is no validator for meaning. So if yours is three keywords in a row, it is technically valid and will pass, which is exactly what happens on most sites.
The page also says the name in your structured data should match the name and alternate name you use for your site name. Which leads to the part that does have rules.
The part with real rules: your name
If you were planning to compress the story into your business name, there are written rules that say no.
Google's guidelines for representing your business say the name should reflect the business's real world name as used on storefronts, websites and stationery, and that putting unnecessary information in the name "isn't permitted". The things it lists include marketing taglines, phone numbers, URLs, product descriptions and location details, and it warns this can lead to suspension.
So the name is for the name. The story lives in the prose on the page, in the description, and in the first minute of any call. Trying to compress it into the name costs you the profile.
Write it in five sentences
An exercise, and take the constraint literally. Five sentences, no more.
- One about the customer's situation before they met you, in their words.
- One about what they tried that did not work, without naming a competitor.
- One about the single decision you work by differently.
- One containing evidence somebody could check.
- One about what you do not do, or who you are not right for.
The fifth is the one nobody writes, and it is the cheapest credibility available. Somebody who says we are not right for you if you need a result in two weeks reads as confident, not as turning down work.
If you cannot write the third sentence, the problem is not the writing. It is that no decision has been made, which is a different subject and it starts with finding your unique selling point.
The story and local values
A question that always comes up in the Egyptian and Saudi markets: should the story carry local values, and how, without turning into slogans. That is worked through from the identity and execution side in expressing local values in your brand identity, rules rather than slogans, which is in Arabic. The idea worth taking from it is that a value not visible in a decision is a slogan.
Honest limits
Three.
First, a story does not fix a weak offer. If what you sell is not bought by the people who have already seen it, a better story distributes that problem to more people. It enlarges the problem.
Second, there is no evidence here that a story increases sales. We are not citing research on storytelling and marketing, because we did not read any while writing this. What is above is experience and observation. The two documented facts in this article are Google's, and they are about the form your story takes in search, not about its effect on a decision.
Third, if your structured data description is empty right now, that is not an emergency. There is no required field and Google will not penalise you. But the page keeps whatever somebody else wrote about you, or stays blank, and both are worse than two sentences you wrote yourself.
If you are building trust from nothing and have little evidence to tell, the practical order is in how to earn trust as a new brand.
You can read this as a decision on its own, but it is really part of a bigger question: where will you win? My book Growth Engine gives that question a whole part, with the six strategies, how they stack, and how to pick between them. It is free, in Arabic: Part 3, Strategies: where will you win.