Newbie SEO ?: Does my About page URL have to contain the word About?

[christyr]

New to WordPress and SEO. Built and launched my website last week. The URL was originally domain/about. However, I installed Yoast plugin and it told me "about" was a stop word. So, without too much thought (my first problem), I changed the url (before Google crawled me) to clearwingcommunications.com/storytelling. Since then, I've noticed that sites I know are optimized have their URL with the word "about." So, is this considered a bad practice?

My site HAS been crawled at this point. If I change it back to About and do a 301 redirect, does that hurt reporting?

Thanks for your help!

Christy

[christyr]

Thanks for your thoughts...I played it safe and changed it back to About with a 301.

[christyr]

Thank you.  I decided to change it back to about and figured out how to do my first 301.

While I agree about the power of the keyword,  I would rather that keyword point to another page,  so I decided to play it safe and go back to about. Thanks for your thoughts!

[christyr]

Thank you.  I decided to change it back to about and figured out how to do my first 301. Thanks!

[nhhernandez]

Just to echo Andrew's answer above, making the heading, URL etc say what the page is about is also more user-friendly. If they're looking for more information about you, they may not know that this page contains the info they want.

You can change the URL back to about and request google to crawl and index the page (use the fetch tool). If they've indexed /storytelling, it's going to come up in the broken links section of Google Search Console. If so, yes, do a 301 redirect.

[Andrew-SEO]

I would stick to "about" or "about us". Making these pages easy to find is important. I think Google use these pages to detect where your company is located. If the site has an address this increases trust. If the same address is in the Google Business Page this improves local search.

Here's a handy guide

https://moz.com/blog/9-simple-tips-for-making-an-about-us-page-that-works-for-your-brand