In the LinkedIn sea of donkeys, be the unicorn!
If you are on LinkedIn and are not probably happy with your ranking or profile visibility, then you are at the right place, thank god…well by which we mean paid and unpaid marketing.
You might be on the losing end if you do nothing about your LinkedIn profile!
LinkedIn is one of the fantastic yet underused tools for anyone looking to promote their businesses or finding job opportunities.
In order to get the most from LinkedIn, it is crucial to attracting search engine traffic.
How can you do that?
Well, you are just a few steps away from minor tweaks and changes you need to make to your LinkedIn profile in order to take it to a whole new level and enjoy success.
But before that let us take a look at the LinkedIn statistics which will show the rise of this platform till date.
Some statistics to blow your mind
- The total number of users on LinkedIn: 450 million
- The number of unique visitors visiting LinkedIn: 106 million
- Adding a profile picture to your LinkedIn account makes you 36 times more likely to receive a message there.
- The number of LinkedIn member page views in Q1 of 2016: 45 billion
- An addition of 5 or more skills in your LinkedIn profile helps you get 17 times more profile views.
- The number of standard skills added on LinkedIn is 45,000
- The number of Asians on LinkedIn is 109 million
- The number of Europeans on LinkedIn is 104 million
- Total number of Indians using LinkedIn platform are 35 million
Why was LinkedIn getting ignored?
LinkedIn is often overlooked by marketers, media planners, job seekers, and business owners because of some myths and challenges. Some of these misconceptions are:
- LinkedIn is in-between. It is neither a true content platform nor a typical social networking site.
- When compared with Google and Facebook, LinkedIn’s audience is much smaller.
- People tend to think of using LinkedIn for only B2B purpose since the focus is on the business connection while there’s a lot more to LinkedIn.
For instance, when someone Google searches you, your LinkedIn profile is likely to show up in the first or second spot.
As per Gravitate Online study, in a study of more than 8 million clicks, over 94% of users clicked on the first page results whereas less than 6% clicked on the second page. About 50% of all the clicks were dedicated to first and second positions.
Another importance of LinkedIn that we have been missing out on is the expansion of your success by offering expertise and essential connections.
LinkedIn has an upper hand in areas like sourcing staff; solving problems that can’t be solved by the current people in your company; a need of opening doors with partners or clients; requirement of a service provider referral; or wanting to research what the competition is doing?
With LinkedIn in your hand, you can have answers to all these needs.
The most important thing we need to focus on is using LinkedIn as a platform for ultimate personal branding. LinkedIn gives the best opportunities to boost your visibility and credibility with members of your brand community. It helps you to stay connected to massive networks of contacts.
Since you can add videos and images to your experience and summary fields, you can develop a truly 3-D view of your brand. Integrating and implementing all the features of LinkedIn will help you create a compelling picture of who you are in the real world.
What will you learn by the end of this blog?
- By the end of this blog, you will be acquainted with what are the possible tips and hacks in which you can optimize your LinkedIn profile. Optimization of the LinkedIn profile will help you gain visibility and rankings on the platform.
- If you are someone searching for a job or growing your network, these methods of optimization will help you in the real-time world.
Optimizing LinkedIn profile
Since LinkedIn is slowly and gradually coming up with more and more options which can be optimized and thereby, help users to improve their profiles for LinkedIn search.
With its new ‘How You Rank’ feature, it will tell you about the percentile you are in when it comes to views in your industry. What will feature serve? With How You Rank feature, you can see if you are in the top 5 percent of views as compared to the top 50 percent.
Not just this, you can see the changes to this number with the time. Got your rank? Not what you have had hoped for? Well, it’s time to turn your attention to your LinkedIn account.
Get, set, SEO your LinkedIn account…
In this blog, we will discuss simple and effective tips to optimize your LinkedIn account for better visibility. Keeping in mind, many of the continuous changes and optimization of LinkedIn optimization options, here are few tips that will help people better search your profile.
1. Try the Publisher option
This option is comparatively new and helps you post articles directly to LinkedIn. Why is this beneficial? With the publisher option, you can not only show your expertise but give the LinkedIn bots more information and content to work with.
If you are posting on LinkedIn, it will signal people that you are active and your name along with your photograph will show up in the news feed of your connections.
How can you use LinkedIn publisher option?
You just have to visit your homepage and click the edit option (the little pencil icon), which will be below your photo. After that, you can copy and paste it.
You can publish and check metrics thereafter once the post is live. The post will show up in the news feed of your connections’ news feed and your LinkedIn profile page under the posts section.
2. Leave no information field blank and use keywords
The profile you have written about yourself is great and you are promoting yourself in every possible manner. This is possible because search engines can crawl your profile and serve it up in the relevant search result.
How? Well, thanks to the relevant keywords you have included in your text.
It is crucial to include these keywords in your profile description as it optimizes your profile for search engines.
Add keywords related to your job function or business in your profile text to help Google and Bing get a better idea on what you are and who you are, thereby enabling searchers to find you.
LinkedIn Optimization is nearly equivalent to filling out all the information possible and using keywords as often as possible. It is important to make sure that everything is filled out on your profile and you are using detailed keywords. This could be your special projects, description, extra features like volunteer history, causes you are concerned about, and experiences.
3. Use standard job titles
At times, people will create job titles for themselves in order to show that they are a jack-of-all-trades or their personality. For instance, ‘Writer/Editor’ is not a job title that LinkedIn is really searching for.
These titles could be more accurate or fun but not standard ones. If you use more standard job titles, the better it is. Using these standard job titles means you are using keywords that people search for and thereby, optimize your profile.
4. Promotion of LinkedIn the profile on the web
A little bit of publicity is much needed in the optimizing your LinkedIn profile. Without promoting your profile, it will be limited to just a few. But how do I promote my profile?
You cannot go about shouting that you have a LinkedIn profile but what you can do is link your profile wherever needed. For example, put a link to your profile in your email signature along with other social networking accounts so that you can begin with creating inbound links.
Also, if you publish something interesting on your LinkedIn, you can link back to that post on your other profiles such as Twitter or Facebook. However, you have to be careful mixing social audiences until you are sharing something relevant.
This way will help you gain a little extra visibility to your profile, hopefully, some new connections and links too.
5. Have endorsements
Endorsements might or might not affect your rankings, but it will help to increase the value of your profile and stay connected with your network. Some people think that the new LinkedIn How You Rank means that the site is going toward popularity-based ranking. This has implied that endorsements are easily a part of that.
How can you collect endorsements? You can collect endorsements by asking some of your closest connections or endorsing other people.
This helps to turn the attention to the skills that you add in your endorsement section and make sure they are accurate as well as detailed.
6. Change your anchor text links
LinkedIn profile supports up to three links, including the company blog and website. However, the common mistake people make is that anchor text can be customized as per your needs.
You can make it more descriptive if you need. All you need to do is select the ‘other’ option.
7. Is your public profile visible?
It may sound obvious, but still, it is crucial to make sure your public profile is visible. Well, if you are thinking that whatever you are posting will be publicly visible (as the name suggests) then it is not the case.
You just have to scroll over your account name, choose settings, click Edit Your Public Profile, and then make sure that the option next to Make My Public Profile Visible to Everyone is ticked.
In steps:
- Your account name
- Settings
- Edit Your Public Profile
- Choose ‘Make My Public Profile Visible to Everyone’
Further, you have to…
8. DoFollow URLs
LinkedIn is one of the social networking sites that helps you to include DoFollow Links to your profile. With a DoFollow Link, one can pass some search engine love in terms of authority and link value from LinkedIn site to whatever sites you opt.
You get three DoFollow links that can point to your Twitter account, your blog or your company site – these are exceedingly valuable.
However, it is important to remember if you misuse this feature, you will be at a risk of LinkedIn making these links NoFollow which will eventually ruin it for everyone.
9. Increase your Group Membership
By joining as well as participating in informational and relevant groups won’t just expand your network but it will also improve SEO of your profile.
As the group names appear on your profile, search engines have starts to crawl the title and thereby learn more about what you do and who you are. By joining industry-relevant groups , you will not only improve the keywords on your profile but local groups can boost the geo-targeted SEO.
10. Analyze LinkedIn SEO
Without monitoring and tracking the profile, you don’t know where your efforts are taking you.
The keywords used in your LinkedIn profile as well as the tracking of the traffic is one of the most important steps you should be looking at. You can do this by using the Profile Stats Pro Package provided by LinkedIn. It helps you analyze the exact type of data you wish. However, if you are a paid user of LinkedIn, then you can avail this service. But if you are serious about your LinkedIn SEO, then this is a minute investment to make in your future.
Checklist for Improving your LinkedIn Profile
Change your LinkedIn SEO game…
Using these simple and quick LinkedIn SEO, you can make enough difference to your LinkedIn profile fares.
Once you start executing tips like analyzing, expanding your member groups, using the standard job titles, or promoting your LinkedIn profile on the web, you will see a significant change in your LinkedIn profile.
Which LinkedIn optimization tip you are excited to try? Have something to add?
Image Credits: elegantthemes, resumeprofessionalwriters, LinkedIn, googleusercontent, proresource
