Teachers ask us how to make a listing sound more appealing. For me that’s the wrong question — the listing isn’t failing because it reads badly. It’s failing because of who it’s written for.
Let me borrow something from outside yoga entirely, because it makes this obvious in about thirty seconds.
If I handed you a drill and asked you to sell it, most people would tell me it’s high-grade steel, German-made, six blades, comes with a case. All true. And none of it is what anybody wants.
Nobody has ever wanted a drill. They want a hole.
The drill is just how you get one.
When to use this
- Before writing or rewriting a class listing
- If your description is beautiful and your class isn’t filling
- When you’re setting up a profile, a directory entry or a venue listing
- Any time you catch yourself naming a style and stopping there
What this has to do with your class description
Most yoga listings are drill descriptions.
Come and do Ashtanga. Vinyasa flow, all levels. Restorative with sound. Those are the steel and the six blades. They describe the thing, accurately, to someone who already knows what it is.
The person searching doesn’t. They’re typing something into a phone at half ten at night because their back has been at them for three weeks, or they haven’t slept properly since March, or they just want one hour a week where nobody needs anything from them.
Their hole is a back that behaves. Yours is a style name.
Two vocabularies, and the order matters
In my experience there’s the language the practice deserves, and the language people search in. Both are real. The mistake is picking one.
You need the listing to be findable in the second and truthful in the first, in that order — because the poetry only ever reaches somebody who found the page.
So the plain nouns go at the front. Beginners yoga in Morningside. Tuesday evenings. Small classes. Then the description you actually wanted to write can do its work underneath, on someone who’s now reading it.
I’d say most teachers have this exactly backwards, and it costs them more than any other single thing on this list.
What to do about it
Lead with the problem, not the method. For stiff backs and desk shoulders reaches further than therapeutic alignment-based practice, and means the same thing.
Use their nouns. Beginners. Gentle. Near me. Evening. Small. Over 50s. Pregnancy. Back. Sleep. These are unglamorous and they are what people type.
Say where you are, plainly. The single most-typed word in this whole category is the name of a place. If your town isn’t in your listing, you have made yourself hard to find on purpose.
Then be distinctive. Once they’ve found you, tell them what’s actually different about your room. That’s where the writing you’re proud of belongs.
The bit that feels like a compromise
It won’t read as beautifully. That’s the trade, and it’s worth naming rather than pretending it away.
But a description nobody finds isn’t a description. It’s a diary entry.
Action steps
- Open your class listing and find the first five words. Are they a style name?
- Rewrite the opening line with a plain problem and a place in it.
- Search for your own class the way a stranger would, from your own town. See what comes up.
- Leave the description you love — just move it down the page.
Related resources
- Where students actually come from
- Who is this actually for?
You might do all of this, look at the result, and dislike it. Plenty of teachers do at first. Give it a term before you judge it, and judge it on who turns up rather than on how it reads to you.