How to write a Skillyard listing that converts

Two jobs, one listing. Getting the click on a category page and getting the enquiry once someone reads the full page. Here is how to do both.

title: How to write a Skillyard listing that converts summary: Two jobs, one listing. Getting the click on a category page and getting the enquiry once someone reads the full page. Here is how to do both. date: 2026-07-05

Your Skillyard listing has two jobs. It has to earn the click when a buyer is scanning a category page or a search result. Then it has to convert that click into an enquiry once the buyer is reading the full listing.

Writing a low-effort listing can really hamper your chance of getting found and getting leads.

This guide covers how to write each element of your Skillyard listing to do those two jobs.

Tagline

The tagline is the second line the buyer reads, after your business name. It appears on category tiles alongside the business name. Its job is to make the difference between a click and a skip.

Bad taglines say what every training business says. "Delivering excellence in learning and development." "Helping teams reach their potential." "Bespoke solutions for modern businesses." These are wallpaper. Every trainer sounds like this, so none of them stand out.

Good taglines say what you actually do and for whom. "Leadership programmes for owner-managed businesses in the South West." "IOSH courses for construction supervisors." "Sales training for professional services firms selling into procurement." A buyer scanning these knows immediately whether you might be relevant for them.

Specific beats aspirational every time. Give the buyer information they can decide with.

Short description

The short description is the two-to-three-sentence summary that appears at the top of the full listing. It is also used for the metadata for your listing, so will appear in search snippets. It expands on the tagline and gives the buyer their first real sense of your business.

We suggest you cover three things - What you do. Who you do it for. And anything that makes your approach unique or specific to a market.

Bad short descriptions try to be everything to everyone. "We work with organisations of all sizes across every sector, delivering bespoke training and consulting solutions tailored to your unique needs." This tells the buyer nothing.

Good short descriptions plant a flag. "Bristol leadership consultancy working with senior teams at professional services firms. Programmes are designed around the transition from operator to leader, with a mix of group sessions and individual coaching." That tells the buyer who you serve, where you work and how you approach it. Someone who fits will keep reading. Someone who doesn't will move on, which is exactly what should happen.

Long description

The long description is where the buyer decides whether to enquire. It's read by people who have already got past the tagline and short description, so they're interested in principle. Your job here is to convert interest into action.

A few things earn their keep in a long description.

Depth on your approach. What is your take on the subject matter you work in. How do you think about the work. What patterns do you see. What do you avoid. This is where the buyer starts to build trust in you as an individual or team, not just as a listing.

Specifics about who you work with. Not just sector, but the shape of the client. Owner-managed businesses of a certain size. Public sector teams facing a specific challenge. Growing scale-ups with particular characteristics. Buyers recognise themselves in specifics and don't recognise themselves in generalities.

Something about you as a person or a team. Where your background comes from. What you did before you started the training business. Why you moved into training. The buyer is often buying a person as much as a service, and giving them a sense of who you are matters.

Language that sounds like you, not like an AI. Buyers can tell the difference between a listing that a human wrote and a listing someone had generated. The one that sounds like a real person almost always wins.

Avoid three things. Wall-of-text formatting with no line breaks. Claims that would be hard to substantiate under questioning. Marketing-speak that could be lifted onto any competitor's site without changing a word.

Specialism

The specialism field is a short phrase that captures the sharpest thing you do. It's used across the site to describe you and to help buyers filter and search.

Vague specialisms like "leadership and management training" don't help you show up for specific searches. Sharper specialisms like "First-time manager development for growing SMEs" or "IOSH courses for construction and manufacturing" do.

Pick the specific thing you do best. Not the widest thing you might do at a stretch.

Categories and sub-categories

Skillyard indexes sixteen main categories, each with a set of sub-categories. Choose the primary category that best fits your main work. Add secondary categories only where you genuinely deliver them, not categories you hope you might one day cover.

For sub-categories, three to six is the right shape for most trainers. Choose the ones you actually specialise in. A trainer tagged with every sub-category in a category signals "I do everything and nothing in particular," or worse it feels spammy. Buyers scanning listings notice.

The sub-categories you choose feed the filters that buyers use to narrow their search. If you're not on the sub-category, you don't appear in the filtered view.

Location and service areas

Your home town and home region set where you're based. Your service towns and service regions set where you actively work.

Be honest about both. Listing every UK city as a service town doesn't help you rank for any of them. Listing the specific towns and regions you genuinely deliver in tells the buyer where you actually operate.

Service towns and regions are for places you deliver in person. If your work is fully online, tick Online under Formats and leave service towns and regions blank. Online delivery is treated as nationwide across the site, so you'll appear in relevant buyer searches without needing to list every region.

Formats

The formats field tells buyers how you deliver. In person at your venue. In person at the client's site. Online. Bespoke. Some combination.

Pick the ones you genuinely deliver. If you don't do onsite delivery, don't tick it because you might. Buyers who filter for it and get you in their results then discover you don't actually do it will not enquire again.

Sample courses

Optional but worth doing. A short set of sample courses (two to five) gives the buyer a concrete sense of what you deliver. Each course wants a title, a one-paragraph description and the formats it runs in.

Sample courses do two jobs. They give the buyer specifics to hang your listing on, and they help the site's structured data describe your offering to AI-search tools. Both matter in 2026, where AI-driven discovery is a real slice of how buyers find providers.

Logo

For established businesses, your logo is your logo. Likely you'll have some sort of thumbnail logo or small sqaure version. This might be a good choice here.

For smaller businesses or individual trainers, if you don't have a logo, you'll need one. A logo is compulsory to list, primarily to maintain the visual appeal of the index. A clean, distinct logo helps you stand out on category tiles. It doesn't need to be fancy. A monogram, a simple mark or a well-set business name all work.

If you have your logo on a transparent background, there are options at upload time to add either a white or black background.

Contact and links

Website URL, contact email, telephone and social links round out the listing. Fill in the ones you actually monitor. Don't include a Twitter link if you haven't posted since 2019.

The most important field here is contact email or a working enquiry route. Buyers who want to reach you should be able to do so easily. If your contact route is friction-heavy, enquiries drop.

Testing your listing once it's live

Once your listing is live, go take a look. We suggest looking at three things.

As it appears on the category tile alongside the other tiles. Does it earn the click?

As it appears at the top of the full listing page. Do the tagline and short description make you want to read further?

As it appears further down the page. Does the long description convert interest into an enquiry?

If any of those three isn't working, iterate. Skillyard listings can be edited freely from your dashboard.

Where to look next

For more on how buyers think when they land on Skillyard, our About page explains the site's positioning and how it works.

For getting your listing found once it's live, our upcoming guides on getting found by buyers and building repeat business will cover the wider marketing picture.