“Over twenty years’ experience and a passion for achieving the best possible outcome for every client.” If that sentence, or one very like it, sits under your photo on the firm website, you’re in good company, because it sits under most of them, and it tells a prospective client almost nothing they came to find out. A professional bio gets read by somebody deciding whether they’d like to sit across a desk from you, and most bios are written as though the reader were a recruiter checking a CV.
Last week I made the case that clients choose the person before the firm, and the principal’s own page is where that choice mostly gets made.
Who’s actually reading your professional bio
By the time somebody lands on your page, they’ve usually decided you’re probably competent, because a friend vouched for you or your firm turned up when they searched. What they’re working out now is whether you’re somebody they’d be comfortable dealing with, and most of that comes down to whether you’ve helped people in their situation before and how you’d explain things to them. Admission dates and memberships answer a different question. They still matter, just further down the page.
Write it in the first person
Third person bios (“Sarah is a highly experienced practitioner who…”) read like somebody else is vouching for you, and the reader knows full well you wrote it yourself. First person reads like the start of a conversation, which is exactly what a professional bio is for. Open with who you work with and how, in the plain words you’d use in a first meeting, something like “I mostly work with couples in their fifties who’ve left retirement planning a bit late, and the first meeting is mostly me listening.”
Then add the one thing you tell every new client. A physio might say he always asks what you’ve stopped doing because of the injury, because that tells him more than the scan does. A family lawyer might say she tells everyone in the first ten minutes that most matters never go anywhere near a courtroom. That sentence shows how you work better than any list of services, and it’s the bit of a professional bio a reader actually remembers.
Credentials go at the bottom, and they still go on
None of this means losing the qualifications. Put your admission or registration and any accreditation underneath, where somebody checking can find them, and if you aren’t formally accredited, check what your professional body says before the words specialist or expert go anywhere near the page. A registration that can be verified against the relevant register is a strong trust signal, and it works hardest at the bottom of a professional bio that already sounds like a person.
Your professional bio is also where Google looks
Google’s own guidance on helpful content asks whether it’s clear who wrote a page, and whether bylines lead to further information about the author and the areas they write about. In plain terms, every article on your site should carry the author’s name, and that name should link through to their bio, which is a small job and a big part of the SEO and blogging work we do for firms. Do that and the bio becomes the place that ties everything a principal has published back to a real, checkable person.
That only works if each principal has a page of their own with its own address. If your professional bios currently live in pop-ups on a team grid, there’s nothing for a byline to link to and nothing for anyone to find when they search a name, so that’s the first thing to change.
Link the bio back out to what you’ve written and to your LinkedIn profile as well, so a reader who likes the sound of you can keep going, and a search engine can see that the person and the work belong together.
A photo from this year
Use a photo taken this year that looks like you on an ordinary weekday, so the person who walks in for a first meeting recognises who they’re shaking hands with. Studio or natural light are both fine. What lets a professional bio down is the decade-old headshot or the wedding photo with somebody cropped out of it.
Keep the whole thing somewhere between 250 and 400 words, then read it out loud. If it sounds like you talking to a new client across the desk, it’s done, and if it sounds like a CV, it isn’t yet.
If you’d like a hand with yours, I do a free visibility check where I go through your bio and your firm’s site the way a prospective client would and send back the first three things I’d change.
