I’ve said before: we all hate writing our own bios. It’s a universal trait. It’s tough to casually brag about yourself while being concise and factual. So it can be tempting to just avoid writing your bio at all or put it off.

No one really wants to learn about you anyway, right?

Surprisingly, for me at least, that’s not the case. The About Us page of any website is almost always my first visit. Before I follow anyone on Twitter, I make sure to read their bio to see how likely they are to interest me. But my own personal habits are perhaps not that convincing. Here are several reasons why your bio really matters.

3 Reasons Why Your Bio Matters

1. Education The truth is, people don’t know what you do. Even if you are a painter and it’s right there in your name – Kristin’s Painting – people still don’t know what you do. Even if it seems really obvious, I promise you plenty of people still don’t know what you do. Do you do artistic paintings? Building painting? Residential or commercial? Interior, exterior or both? People don’t know what you do, so you need to tell them in 2-5 sentences. Then, for added brownie points, you can tell them why they need you to do what you do.
2. Brand Reputation You want people to know you’re so much more professional/cooler/educated than your competition? How are they supposed to know that if you don’t choose the words that represent your brand? If you don’t write your own bio and About page, other people will determine which words represent your brand in its entirety. Your brand should be determined by you and you alone. Make it count.
3. Keywords The great part about taking them time to write these bios is that they likely contain a whole lot of keywords. This is excellent for two reasons. First, it inherently helps boost your rank in searches for those keywords. Second, if you take the time to SEO your pages,identifying the keywords to use in your SEO is mostly done once you’ve written your bio. It’s a win-win-win.

I know it can be frustrating to write a bio. But it’s not something you can afford to skip. It is a task you can outsource but it is definitely not one you want to let slide.