Schema Markup·4 min read

Structured Data for About Pages: AboutPage Guide

An agency site tells clients what it does on every service page, but only one URL says who the agency actually is. That makes the About page worth marking up: it's the single page where search engines expect to learn about the company or person behind the domain. This guide walks through the AboutPage type, shows a worked example for a fictional agency, and covers the mistakes that quietly waste the markup, plus the cases where a different page type is the better call.

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What AboutPage markup actually does

One page, one entity.

Picture Northbeam, a twelve-person digital agency. Prospects who hear the name search for it, and Google puts together what it knows about the company from many scattered signals. An AboutPage declaration marks the page where the organization describes itself. That helps agencies in particular, because their sites are full of pages about other companies: client case studies and portfolio entries that can blur which company the site belongs to.

Technically, AboutPage is a subtype of WebPage in the Schema.org vocabulary. It inherits every WebPage property, so there is no new structure to learn, just a more precise label. There's no Google rich result attached to it. The value is clarity: combined with a mainEntity that names the organization or person, it helps search engines connect the site to that entity.

A worked AboutPage example for an agency

Two nodes, one link.

Say Northbeam's About page lives at https://northbeam.agency/about-us. The About Page Schema Generator writes an @graph with two nodes by default. The first is the page: {"@type":"AboutPage","@id":"https://northbeam.agency/about-us#webpage","name":"About Northbeam","url":"https://northbeam.agency/about-us","mainEntity":{"@id":"https://northbeam.agency/#organization"}}. The second is the Organization itself, with that same @id, the company name, homepage, logo, founder, founding year and sameAs profiles.

The @id link is the part worth studying. The page doesn't repeat the company details; it points at the organization node, and your homepage, articles and contact page can point at the same @id. Everything on the site then describes one entity instead of several near-copies. If you want a single simpler block, untick Output as @graph and the Organization is nested inside mainEntity instead, though other pages can't reference it that way.

Company or person

The same page type works for both.

Not every About page is about a company. A freelancer, author or creator can choose A person instead of A company or organization, and the AboutPage then points at a Person with a photo, job title and profiles. Two example buttons, Company About page and Personal brand, load complete blocks so you can see the difference before filling in your own.

Pick whichever matches what the page is really about. A solo consultancy that trades under the founder's name often fits Person; a studio with staff and a brand name fits Organization.

AboutPage or plain WebPage

Every AboutPage is a WebPage, so why not use the generic type? Because the specific label costs nothing and says more. Given two labels that are both true, the more precise one tells crawlers strictly more. Keep plain WebPage for pages that genuinely resist classification, and let your About URL carry the label built for it.

Hybrid pages need a decision. Plenty of small agency sites put the story, the team and a contact form on one URL. Pick the type matching the page's main purpose: if the H1 says About Us and the form is a footnote, AboutPage is honest. If contact details dominate, ContactPage fits better. What you shouldn't do is stack both types on one page.

AboutPage mistakes that waste the markup

All of these pass a validator. None of them help you.

A validator only proves the JSON is well formed. These errors survive validation and still cost you:

Publishing the AboutPage block on the wrong URL, or sitewide through a shared header template, so ten pages all claim to be the About page.
An organization name or logo that doesn't match your Organization markup elsewhere, like Northbeam here and Northbeam Digital Ltd in a plugin's block.
Bumping dateModified on every deploy while the page text hasn't changed.
A founder or founding date in the markup that the page itself never mentions.
Marking up /about while the page's canonical tag points to /about-us, leaving the markup on a URL Google won't index.

Three habits for better AboutPage markup

First, press Auto-fill from URL and then correct, rather than typing from memory. The tool reads your title tag, meta description, og:image, page language, dates and site name, and uses the site's root as the entity homepage. The mismatches you spot while correcting are often worth fixing in the page itself.

Second, keep the markup description close to your meta description rather than writing a third version of your pitch. Third, revisit the block when the company changes: a rebrand, a merger or a new domain makes stale About markup misleading on the one page where accuracy matters most. If an SEO plugin already outputs Organization markup, reuse its @id or turn that part off so there is only one organization description.

When AboutPage is the wrong tool

For the company itself on the homepage, with contact points, identifiers and a full set of profiles, use the Organization Schema Generator, and give it the same @id this page points to. For an author page about one person, ProfilePage markup from the Person Schema Generator is the type Google documents.

When the page is your contact URL rather than your story, the Contact Page Schema Generator builds a ContactPage linked to the organization with one contact point per department. For other page types, the WebPage Schema Generator covers eleven of them in one form.