Skills on Specialty Profiles - Many or Few?

[nicole_v_]

I was curious about how adding skills to your specialty pages affects your ability to rank higher in searches.

I added a lot of skills to my specialty profiles, but I don't know if this is the best practice or if there is any kind of ranking penalization for choosing 'too many' skills? I want to maximize the chances of my profile coming up when someone searches for services that I offer, but I also don't know if including too many skills raises any kind of red flags to the algorithm. 

All the skills included on my specialty profiles are applicable and relevant, I didn't choose random ones just for the sake of ranking higher or gaining more profile views. But, I'm wondering if it should be narrowed down, or if it's okay to include a lot of skills?

[elisa_b]

First of all, I had a look at your profiles, and honestly I felt overwhelmed by the bulky bulleted lists. I hardly think any client will read them all, from beginning to end, because they are.... boring. Bullet points are great for recaps and integration, but you cannot persuade a client of how good you are just with them. 

To answer your question, there are no Upwork penalisations I can think of, but please take into consideration that what I perceived as visually overwhelming could be perceived the same way by potential clients. If I were you, I would try to sum up your skills and remove the redundancies.

One additional piece of advice. You should at least present your services in a more articulated and persuasive way, especially when it comes to your content writing profile. It is made of only bulleted lists, no sentences at all - one could think: she is marketing herself as a writer, yet there is not a single complete sentence in her profile!

Best of luck.