Should I Say “About Us” or “About [Company Name]”?

Say both. The question carries one label and your site has three of them.

Most answers pick a side and stop there. Half of them argue the company name puts a brand keyword into a heading. The other half argue that “About Us” is what visitors scan for. Both sides are fighting over a single label that does not exist.

The nav link is one surface. So is the H1. The title tag as well. Three surfaces. Different audiences on each. No rule anywhere says they have to match.

Nobody Searches “About Us”

Start with the thing that settles the SEO half of this in a minute.

Open your keyword tool and type about us. Read the volume column. Then read what sits behind it. Almost none of that demand wants your business. It wants a template. Or a Wikipedia article. Sometimes an English lesson.

So there is no SEO keyword on the table. The About page does have real queries. That is simply not one of them.

Its actual queries carry your company name plus a suspicion. Reviews. Who owns it. Whether it is legit. Somebody met your business already and went off to check on it.

Neither label wins those searches. Worth sitting with that before anybody rewrites a heading.

One caveat holds. A thin slice of that volume does come from people typing the words after a brand name. They want a specific page faster. Those searchers know who you are already. Your heading is not what got them there.

Somebody Will Say the Brand Keyword Belongs in the H1

Fair objection, and by far the most common one. Putting the company name in an H1 does place a brand keyword in a heading that Google reads.

Only look at what that heading competes for. Your own name.

Most businesses rank for their own name already. Google connected the domain to the business through mentions elsewhere, through a Business Profile, through links and listings built up over years. No heading did that work.

So the H1 argument wins a search you had won before you asked the question. Which is not a reason to avoid writing “About Acme Roofing”. It is a reason to stop giving that argument as the justification.

There is a better reason. Nothing to do with headings at all.

The Cost of “About Us” Sits in the Sentence Underneath

Here is what the label quietly does to the copy below it.

The heading reads About Us. Then paragraph one opens with “We were founded in 2004 by two brothers who spotted a gap.” Paragraph two mentions our team. Paragraph three says we believe.

Now read that page as a stranger would. Or as a machine would. The subject of the page never gets named.

That is the cost. No ranking penalty is involved anywhere. It is just a page about a company that never says which company.

The label sets the pronoun. Write “About Us” at the top and the whole page slides into first person underneath. Use the company name instead and the first sentence tends to name it too. Small nudge, and it holds up remarkably well across sites.

The Test That Settles It in Thirty Seconds

Skip the theory and go look at your own page.

Open your About page. Count how many times your business name appears in the body copy. Ignore the header. Skip the footer and the logo too.

Plenty of sites come back with zero. Some come back with one, sitting inside a copyright line nobody reads.

Then read your opening sentence out loud, on its own, with no page around it. Ask whether a stranger could tell who it is describing.

Where the answer is no, you have found the thing worth fixing. The heading was never it.

Run the same count on a competitor page while you are in there. That gap tends to be wider than anybody expects. It costs another thirty seconds.

Who Needs the Name Spelled Out

Three readers, and all three of them arrive without your homepage for context.

An AI answer engine pulling a summary is the first. A directory editor filling in a listing is the second. Third is a journalist lifting one line for a roundup piece.

Each of them lands on that URL cold. Each needs a sentence they can lift that names its subject. “We were founded in 2004” cannot be lifted anywhere. “Acme Roofing was founded in Calgary in 2004” travels fine.

Nothing exotic is going on there. It is the plain difference between a page that can be quoted and a page that cannot.

Your own staff run into it too. Somebody pastes the About paragraph into a proposal, then has to rewrite the pronouns by hand.

What the Nav Link Should Say

Just About.

Not “About Us”, and certainly not the company name. Anybody scanning a menu bar has already read the logo. They know whose site this is. Menus carry maybe six words of budget in total.

Anchor text argues the same way. A nav link reading “About Acme Roofing” fires on every page across the site. That makes it boilerplate rather than a signal. Repeat the same anchor text on every page and it says nothing specific about where it points.

So the menu turns out to be the one place where your company name genuinely earns nothing.

Where the Company Name Does Earn Its Place

The title tag comes first. Search results show it. Somebody who typed your name wants confirmation they landed correctly. “About Acme Roofing | Calgary Roofers Since 2004” confirms it inside three words.

Then the H1. The same wording is fine here, though the heading is doing a different job. It tells a stranger which page they just opened.

Then the opening sentence. That one matters most and gets skipped most.

Then your organization schema, where the full legal name belongs. Machines read that field. No visitor ever sees it.

Four placements, only one of which is the heading everybody argues about.

Order matters far less than presence. Get the name into all four and the heading debate stops being interesting. Miss all four and no heading rescues the page.

When the Company Name Reads Badly

Long names break this. Formal ones break it too.

“About Precision Industrial Fabrication Services Group Ltd.” is not a heading. It reads like a filing. Use the trading name people actually say out loud, then park the legal version in the schema and the footer.

Generic names create the opposite trouble. A business called Calgary Home Services ends up with “About Calgary Home Services”. That reads like a stuffed heading, despite being nothing more than the name. Nothing to fix there. Write it once and move on.

Then there is the solo operator. Saying About Us and meaning it works fine there. So does dropping the plural altogether. Ask three clients what they call the business. Use whichever word they use.

About Page Naming for Calgary Businesses

This question comes up more than you would expect at SEO Company To-The-TOP!. It surfaces during a site audit, rarely inside a content project.

The finding rarely changes. Either label is fine. The body copy underneath has usually been sitting in first person since the page first went up.

Fixing that costs about twenty minutes. Name the business in the opening sentence, once more further down, then leave everything else alone. It is among the smallest items on most Calgary SEO lists and one of very few that finishes the same afternoon.

Larger movement still comes from pages built to answer non-branded searches. A website audit shows which of those already exist and which are missing. Expect three to six months before positions shift. Three to six days is not the pace search engine optimization works at. Meanwhile a Google Ads campaign from To-The-TOP! covers the months in between. Nobody inside an ads account has ever once asked what an About page heading says.

Common Questions About Naming Your About Page

Does “About Us” hurt SEO?

No. It carries no keyword worth winning. No ranking penalty attaches to the phrase either. The heading is simply the wrong thing to worry about on that page. Look at the body copy instead, since that is where the actual problem usually sits.

Should the nav link and the H1 match?

They do not have to. Google has been reading mismatched anchor text and headings for as long as it has crawled menus. Keep the menu short. Then let the heading say more.

Where should my company name appear on the About page?

The title tag. The opening sentence. Your organization schema. Add one more mention in the body if the page runs long. Ten mentions are no better than three.

Is “About [Company Name]” keyword stuffing?

Not at one instance in a heading. Stuffing means repeating a term past what the sentence needs. Your name in the heading of a page about your company is exactly what the sentence needs.

What about “Our Story” or “Meet the Team”?

Both work, and both are worse for a stranger arriving cold, since neither one says which company. Use them as subheadings under a plainer H1 where you want the personality.

Does any of this change how AI tools describe my business?

It can. Those tools summarize whatever the page says, so a page that never names its subject hands them less to work with. Your opening paragraph is worth a look tonight.