LinkedIn is a valuable social media platform for networking and building connections. It’s also a helpful tool for your business to enhance brand awareness and engage with your audience. Because LinkedIn is a dynamic resource frequently indexed and crawled by Google, it’s crucial to optimize your personal LinkedIn profile and your organization’s LinkedIn page for SEO.
Why You Need SEO for Your LinkedIn Profile
Like search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, optimizing your LinkedIn profile and pages can help increase your search visibility. Optimized profiles and pages will appear in search results, creating leads and leading to conversions. LinkedIn optimization allows you to build connections with like-minded professionals in your industry and attract clients.
7 Ways To Implement LinkedIn SEO
To rank higher and create connections, follow these seven steps to optimize your LinkedIn profile and company page.
1. Include Keywords
Like SEO for an optimized website, your LinkedIn profile and page should include keywords your target audience uses in search. Once you’ve done your keyword research, you should be implementing these terms throughout the copy of your LinkedIn page. Keywords should be in the following sections:
- Tagline
- About
- Experience
- Skills
LinkedIn suggests that you include additional sections in your profile. By completing these extra sections, you can incorporate more keywords and phrases that your target audience uses when searching for your products and services. If you haven’t done so already, consider utilizing the Accomplishments or Featured sections to enhance your profile.
2. Customize Your LinkedIn Profile URL
LinkedIn allows you to create a custom URL for your LinkedIn profile. A LinkedIn profile or business page with a customized URL will rank higher in organic search results when users search for your name or organization. LinkedIn shows you how to customize your personal profile or company page URL.
3. Name Your Profile Picture and Banner Image
How about uploading a new headshot or background photo to your LinkedIn page? Before you upload, rename the image to include your name or relevant keywords. Google will index these images so your face or company logo will appear in image search results.
4. Ask For Reviews
Like Google Business Profile reviews, the LinkedIn service page has a section you can build out to feature your work with current and past clients. Within this section, you can ask clients to review your work. If you don’t have a Premium Business subscription, the Services section of your profile will display a list of the services you offer. This is a great way to add keywords potential clients will search for that are related to your expertise.
With a Premium Business subscription, your profile will feature a Services Showcase. This showcase includes media in a carousel format, a “Request Proposal” button, a preview of your service description, ratings, and most recent four- or five-star review. Additionally, Premium Business subscribers can receive extra project requests from potential clients. To demonstrate your service quality to potential clients, you can ask them to review your services on LinkedIn—request reviews by sending invitations and marking projects as complete.
- Send review invitations – You can invite up to 20 past clients to write a review about your level of service.
- Complete a project – When you mark a project as complete, clients are automatically prompted to write a review without using one of your 20 invitation credits. (source)
5. Publish Optimized Content
LinkedIn articles and native videos are pushed to more users’ eyes by LinkedIn’s algorithm. According to Search Engine Land, this content will likely be seen by three to four times as many people as a shared article or blog post. Because of this, this content should include keywords and be optimized for SEO. Don’t forget to include a call-to-action within the LinkedIn article or in the video post to drive traffic to your website.
6. Update Frequently
One of the most important parts of LinkedIn SEO is being consistent with posting updates. For Google to have new information to crawl, you have to add more content often. LinkedIn is a great platform to share your content marketing materials like blogs, case studies, guides, and ebooks. LinkedIn articles can be utilized to repurpose blog content but beware of posting duplicate content.
7. Check Analytics
To ensure your optimization efforts are working, check the data. LinkedIn provides analytic reports for both personal profiles and company pages. These analytics show the number of profile views, search appearances, and post views your LinkedIn profile received. LinkedIn tracks the number of new followers, post impressions, and unique visitors. Don’t forget to track conversions as well. Check Google Analytics to determine how many leads are coming to your website from your LinkedIn profile or page.
When you approach optimizing your LinkedIn pages using these seven steps, Google will index your page in ways that will benefit you and your company. Use relevant keywords and phrases, publish original content, and analyze the data.
At SMA Marketing, we believe social amplification includes a fully optimized LinkedIn profile. Contact us to schedule your free consultation and learn how we include social media in our content marketing strategy.
