From directory jargon to plain language: how TrustList changed what visitors see

From directory jargon to plain language: how TrustList changed what visitors see

For most of its life, TrustList was an ordinary directory, organised the way a cataloguer thinks: companies here, products there, articles, launches, awards, people, requests. Every menu, every band on the home page and every footer column was a projection of that one list of content types. After about a year offline, the site came back in that shape, and on 25 September 2026 our AdSense application was refused for thin, low-value content. Around 17 September, 24,350 live listings, about a quarter, had fewer than 50 words of profile text, and of the older company profiles with 50 or more words, 82% (54,541 of 66,473) were written in the business's own voice.

The work since then has been to make the site curated rather than merely large, and plain language sits at the centre of it. By the afternoon of 29 September, 29,722 of 72,564 live company listings had been rewritten in our own words to one standard, and the menus had been rebuilt around what visitors are looking for instead of what we call our content types. Nobody turns up wanting "a product listing". They want to pick an accounting package, find an agency that will not waste six months, get their own firm found, or work out whether a supplier is safe to hire.

This is an honest account of that work. Some of it is live and checked. Some of it is built but still being watched. One part, the home page as a starting point for different kinds of visitor, is a written plan and nothing more. We say which is which as we go.

The problem: a site that spoke in its own labels

By the summer, the public site had grown into roughly twenty areas. A visitor had to recognise the right one in passing. The home page had become a long stack of about seventeen sections, and most of them were hard-coded rather than editable, which made it the page that most needed to change and the one hardest to change.

The labels were part of the trouble. A menu called "Explore" told a stranger almost nothing about what was inside it. A mixture of icons appeared on some navigation items and not others. Some menus opened when the pointer merely passed over them, so a panel could appear without anyone asking for it. On phones, there had been no navigation at all at one stage: the header simply hid every link on small screens.

A visual and structural facelift, done without moving a single address

The first big step, deployed on 10 September 2026, was a facelift of the public site. The brief was a more colourful, modern look, more imagery, better usability and stronger connections between pages. One constraint was fixed from the start: every public web address stays exactly as it was. Our addresses carry real search history, and changing them would throw that away. No route was added, renamed or removed.

What the facelift did in reader terms:

• Each area got its own accent colour, so a reader can tell where they are. Companies stay in the brand blue; products, articles, launches, AI models, awards, requests and people each have their own hue. The site stopped looking like one monochrome template.
• Phones got a proper navigation drawer, with search, the main areas and both calls to action.
• Pages stopped being dead ends. Listing pages gained a related-reading rail, a link to sibling categories and links across to the other areas of the site.

One detail from that work is worth telling because it is about honesty in labels. The related-reading rail on a listing page is headed "Related reading" only when something genuinely matched by topic or by linked company. When nothing matched, the same rail is headed "Latest insights". We would rather show an accurate label on a weaker match than claim relevance the data does not support.

The facelift also turned up a mistake of our own. The main ranked category pages had been set to stay out of search results, even though our own notes described them as the pages we wanted found. That was corrected in the same release. We describe the wider search story in our earlier piece on search traffic, so we will not repeat it here.

A simpler header: four menus that behave alike

The facelift improved things, but the header was still a jumble of different kinds of item. On 25 September the owner asked us to rethink the whole top menu with two aims: make it accessible, and make it clearer. The remark that prompted the second aim was blunt: a few items had icons and the others did not.

We rebuilt the bar around a simple rule. Everything of the same kind looks and behaves the same way.

• Four menus, named for what people look for: Rankings, Browse, Insights and Resources. Each is a plain text button with a small arrow and no icon.
• One filled button: "For vendors".
• Two icon buttons, each with a spoken name for screen readers and a tooltip: one to share the page and one for your account.
• "Log in" as plain text, shown at every screen width. Before, phone users had no way to sign in from the header.

Inside every menu, each destination appears as the same kind of row: a small icon, a label and one line saying what you will find there. The old "Explore" menu, which said little, was split up. Companies, products, people, requests and comparisons went under Browse. Articles, launches, AI models and awards went under Insights. The practical tools, such as due diligence checklists, posting a request, writing a review and how we rank, went under Resources.

Every destination that was in the header before is still reachable. Pricing, sponsors, about and contact remain in the footer and the mobile drawer.

How the menus behave

The behaviour changes matter as much as the words:

• Menus open on a click, Enter or Space, never on hover. Nothing pops open because your mouse drifted across it.
• Keyboard users can drive everything. Arrow keys move between links, Home and End jump to the first and last, and Escape closes the menu and returns focus to its button.
• The phone drawer mirrors the desktop bar: the same four groups in the same order, with the group for the page you are viewing starting open. It behaves as a proper dialog, so focus stays inside it.

Share as one icon

The other change was to sharing. We used to have a strip of share buttons taking a full row under the header on every page. It looked clumsy and used space that readers wanted. It is now a single share icon in the bar. Pressing it opens a sheet with the phone's own share menu where available, the usual networks, a copy-link button and an editable message. It reads the page's own title and description at the moment you press it, rather than the site-wide defaults.

One loose end remains. Ranking, topic, country and offshore pages keep their own share button beside the title, with copy written for that page. On those pages there are now two ways to share. We left it because the page-specific wording is useful, but it is an inconsistency and we know it.

Links in the copy that take you to the page answering the phrase

The third change is less visible but, we think, just as useful. If a profile or article mentions "inventory management software", a reader may well want to see how the options compare. If it mentions "accounting firm", they may want a list of them. If it says "United Kingdom", they may want rankings for that country.

We built a phrase-to-page map so that such phrases in body copy link to the TrustList page that answers them. The links are added when the page is built on our side, rather than by a script running in your browser. That has two benefits: nothing jumps around after the page loads, and the links are present in the HTML that search engines read.

The map is generated from pages that actually exist: published rankings, topic pages, category hubs and country pages. A few rules keep it from becoming noisy:

• A phrase has to be at least two words, or a short acronym, before it links. One everyday word such as "marketing" would link far too often.
• The longest matching phrase wins.
• Nothing is linked inside a heading, a button, code, or an existing link.
• No more than six links on a page, and no more than three in a single block of copy.

Clearer profiles, and a plain note where claims are made

Plain language also had to reach the people using the site, not only the ones reading it. Our people directory was meant for individuals: a headline that is your role, an About that is about you, links to your own site and your firm's listing. But the form's wording had been vague. Its guidance read like a LinkedIn-style résumé, which is an easy invitation for a business to post itself as a person.

By 29 September, sixteen profiles were public again, and thirteen of them were businesses presenting themselves as people. The "name" was a company, and the headlines were slogans making ranking claims about themselves. We had already set the rule, days earlier, that a public profile is a person, not an advert. The wording on the form had not caught up with it.

What changed:

• The form now says what a profile is. A short box above the fields gives four rules: your own name, a headline that is your role, an About about you, and links that belong to you. A "Here for your business?" link points to adding a listing instead.
• Going public asks for a confirmation, in plain words: the profile is about me as a person, is not an advert, and makes no "number one" or "best" claims. The server enforces it, so it holds even outside the form.
• The same words appear in both places where profiles are edited. We found that one of the two editors had not been sending the confirmation at all, so a first-time user there would hit an error with no box to tick. Both now draw on one shared set of wording, and the missing box has been added.

Our own red note on claims

Where a profile's text makes a ranking claim about itself, such as calling itself the number one firm in a city, we now show a red note quoting the claim. It says, in essence, that TrustList does not endorse it, that it is the profile owner's own wording, that we have not verified it, and that nobody is ranked on TrustList for what they say about themselves.

The claim detector is deliberately cautious. It looks for things like "number one", "the best" followed by a type of firm, and "leading" followed by a firm type. It leaves alone "best practices", "the best way", "leading to" and "trusted by the finance team". We checked it on real profiles and on eighteen test phrases, seven of them phrases that must not count. It errs towards missing a claim rather than mislabelling an innocent sentence.

Taking adverts down, and what is still outstanding

Thirteen profiles were taken down on 29 September. Eleven advertised a business rather than introducing a person. Two advertised a business TrustList does not list. Three others were kept because they were people. Nothing was deleted, and the owners cannot republish a held profile themselves.

Here is what remains unfinished:

• The notices to those thirteen owners have not been sent. The wording of a customer email needs the owner's approval first. The mechanism is built and tested, and a dry run prints the message.
• Listings are not covered yet. The same self-praise appears in some old listing descriptions, written by the businesses. The same note could go on listing pages. It would touch a large share of the catalogue, so we are waiting for a decision.

Before and after, in numbers

Plain language is not only about menu labels. It is also about the words on every profile. These are the dated changes, set side by side.

• Profile voice: around 17 September 2026, 82% of older company profiles with 50 or more words (54,541 of 66,473) spoke as the business ("we", "our"). By the afternoon of 29 September, 29,722 of 72,564 live company listings had been rewritten to one standard: what the business offers, who it works with, key facts.
• Share in our own words: on 28 September, about 11,500 of 81,127 live, active listings were in our own words, which is 14%.
• Thin profiles: around 17 September, 24,350 live listings had fewer than 50 words. On 26 and 27 September we rewrote 6,165 from the business's own site and parked 15,238 that had nothing to source. Parked listings are archived and can be brought back.
• Spam: on 26 and 27 September we archived 164 wholly spam and 24 partly spam listings and 52 paid guest posts, and blocked 7 reviews.
• Navigation: before 25 September the header mixed icons, hover-open panels and a vague "Explore" menu, and phones had no sign-in link. Since 25 September there are four menus named Rankings, Browse, Insights and Resources, opened by click, and "Log in" shows at every screen width.
• Rankings: around 17 September about 18,000 ranking pages sat in the sitemap, many built from import tags. From 28 September a /best page exists only when a published ranking backs it, and about 12,000 are published.
• People profiles: on 29 September, thirteen of sixteen public profiles were businesses presenting themselves as people. All thirteen were held that day.

Every rewritten profile uses only facts from the business's own site and our records, and passes automated checks for length, copying, hype, invented numbers or names, prices and contact details.

For a reader, this means a page now says what a business does in words that are ours and checkable, not in a slogan the business chose for itself. The menu names tell you what you will find before you click. And where a profile still makes a claim about itself, our red note says so plainly. The catalogue is smaller than it was, and each page in it has had to earn its place.

Sources

• TrustList listing guidelines: https://trustlist.uk/listing-guidelines
• TrustList contribute page: https://trustlist.uk/contribute
• TrustList trust page: https://trustlist.uk/trust
• TrustList for vendors: https://trustlist.uk/for-vendors
• TrustList rankings: https://trustlist.uk/best
• Our earlier article on search traffic: https://trustlist.uk/blog/our-search-traffic-journey-2026
• Google AdSense programme policies: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/48182
• Google spam policies for web search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies
• Google guidance on creating helpful content: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content

Figures and dates about TrustList come from our own internal records, dated in the text: the facelift on 10 September 2026, the header rethink on 25 September 2026, the phrase-link map built on 16 September 2026, the home page plan written on 20 September 2026 and the profile changes on 29 September 2026.