You want people to find you first.
By positioning yourself in front of the competition, you give your firm the first pick in a prospect’s draft.
But, it’s not easy.
People are all vying for number one.
However, there are plenty of ways for you to improve your LinkedIn SEO so that you can leverage your profile to be first in passive lead generation.
In this guide, we take a look at what you can do to bank on keywords, visibility, and better exposure.
LinkedIn Keyword Research
Keyword research is often reliant on a lot of tools, but the problem with LinkedIn is that there aren’t any.
So, how do we go about it?
The old-fashioned way.
Get on your LinkedIn profile and start typing up words on the search bar. Since their search is limited to hits that are on the platform itself, you can narrow down your keyword research.
It’s not the most refined process and it doesn’t yield much, but their search engine results can tell you a lot about how they operate.
Remember:
Some information > no information.
Checking for Keyword Suggestions
You can look for keyword suggestions using the autocomplete feature on LinkedIn’s search bar.
Start by inputting a broad keyword and hitting space. You need to press space or else the search engine won’t suggest anything.
Say instead of sticking in “marketing manager,” you start with marketing.
Now, as you can see, the first suggestion is “marketing manager,” which we can assume is one of the most frequently searched terms with the word marketing the beginning.
You can further refine this process by typing in your second word – say, “manager” – and hitting enter.
You can repeat this process with other keywords that you have in mind.
Here’s the logic behind it.
Search engines are designed for people’s ease of use in mind.
If a lot of people constantly searching for a particular keyword string, it makes sense for a search engine to “suggest” it during a search.
The machine knows that prioritizing the top suggestions, it makes a searcher’s life easier since people can get the results that they want with fewer steps.
Even highly trained SEOs with the most sophisticated keyword research tools still pull up vanilla Google, YouTube, etc. search to check for keyword suggestions that use autocomplete.
Why do we advise that you do this?
What better way to find out what LinkedIn wants to suggest than from LinkedIn itself?
Checking for Keyword Competition
The biggest issue with LinkedIn keyword research is the fact that you can’t pull up the keyword search volume (autocomplete doesn’t give you exact numbers), but you can use their search to find out the number of search results for a given keyword.
This can help you determine the difficulty of the keyword that you are trying to rank for.
The more search results there are, the more difficult it is to rank for that particular keyword.
Let’s start.
Go up to the search bar on your feed and click on “People”.
Now type in a keyword, in this case, we’ll use “head of growth” as an example. Hit enter.
You’ll immediately be taken to a list of results with the number of results for this particular keyword.
Now you rinse and repeat with similar keywords to check for the competition that you have.
Optimizing Your LinkedIn For Search
Once you’re done with your keyword research, you will now have a good idea of what keywords to prioritize and which of them have high competition.
Now, it’s the moment, we’ve all been waiting for.
It’s time to optimize your profile for the keywords that you picked out.
Edit Intro
The most critical place to put in your “primary keyword” is in your headline and current position.
These two places are the most prominent areas that are shown when a prospect does a search on LinkedIn.
It is advisable that you put your real job position in the position field while your headline can contain a shortened version of that.
For example, if you are the head of growth at a particular department in your company, you can put in the full form of your job title in the position field. Your headline can then contain acronyms or the shortened version of your job title.
Here’s what.
You’re going to want to have secondary keywords or other supporting keywords that backup your primary keyword AKA your position/ job title.
To do this, you’re going to want to take advantage of your headline.
Now we’ve got an excellent LinkedIn headline generation guide that you can check out.
But, here’s what you have to keep in mind.
Your headline can serve as a placeholder for multiple keywords.
Here are a few summarised tips for you to get started on the best headline:
- It has to be short, sweet and straight to the point, while creating mystery at the same time.
- If you want a quick way to do it, divide your headline into three to five parts. The first part contains your job title (primary keyword), your second to fourth parts contain your secondary keywords or supporting keywords, with the last part containing something that’s interesting or personal about you.
- Here’s a quick example: Head of Growth | Marketing and Sponsorship Committee | Fortune 500 Operations Consultant | Avid Yoga-Practitioner
- You also don’t have to limit it to vertical half pipes, you can use emojis as your separator of choice.
- If you don’t want to use the bullet point method described above, you can opt to use a one-liner approach, but you have to make sure that it takes into account all the secondary keywords that you want in there.
Now if you follow these quick tips or read our extensive guide, you can get the most out of your SEO optimization.
Summary
Your summary supports the optimizations, and you have to take special care in ensuring that it is complete but written in a way that sparks curiosity for people that land on your page.
Make sure that your primary keyword is in the first paragraph of your summary.
You want to get that out of the way.
Another quick tip is to add your contact information in the first part. This way if you’ve managed to get them hooked in the beginning, they can immediately schedule a meeting with you and you can get conversions in pronto.
This is part of your CRO or your conversion rate optimization.
What some people don’t realize is that conversion rate optimization goes hand-in-hand with LinkedIn search optimization. What’s the point of reeling people in if you can’t get them to convert.
Once you’ve got them through with the optimization of your first paragraph, make sure to sprinkle the rest of your keywords in the rest of your summary.
This serves as “backup” for your primary keywords.
Optionally, you can use your primary keyword more than once in your summary, but here’s our take on that. If it doesn’t sound natural, just skip it altogether. Sometimes less is definitely more.
If you’re looking for more resources on optimization, we’ve got dozens available on the BAMF.co website.
Now that you’ve composed a good summary, it’s time to get into the links that you have on your profile.
Links
Everything that’s optimized in the world of digital marketing has great outbound links. Not only do they serve as an indicator of the relevancy of your profile, but they are also powerful CTAs for your passive lead generation campaign.
This is especially true for B2B companies.
You will want to make sure that you have links coming out of your LinkedIn profile leading to landing pages on your website.
This helps you turn your profile into a landing page in itself.
However, you don’t only have to link back to your landing page. You can also stick in downloads or links to your case studies, articles that you are responsible for authoring.
This allows you to add more relevancy to your profile page and it helps boost your social proof.
Don’t forget to stick in your Facebook, Twitter, etc. URLs as well.
(Make sure that they’re custom URLs and that you use your own custom URLs for LinkedIn as well. It helps with branding and we’ve got an entire article dedicated to that here.)
Pulse Posts
Will you be adding articles to your profile?
Any answer other than “yes” is wrong.
You should.
For conversion rate optimization, it’s a good way to add social proof and establish yourself as a thought leader, and for your search optimization, it makes for a great way to include keywords.
Looking for the next best article to publish?
Why not spend some time boosting the keywords on your profile by publishing posts that have titles that are similar or have relevance to your primary keywords?
While you’re at it add images and don’t forget to rename them – we’ll get to that in just a second.
Uploading Photos
Great profiles have great photos, but you can’t just upload photos indiscriminately.
Rename your photos.
Almost every SEO is on board with this with regular search engine optimization.
And, the reason behind it is really simple.
Search engines like looking at photos, whether it’s metadata or the names of the photos themselves.
If you want a photo recognized for a keyword, include that keyword in the title of the photo.
An Example of a Typical LinkedIn Search
If you want to see this in practice, take a look at the screenshot below.
I highlighted the focused keyword on people’s profiles.
And as you can see, Title, Summary and Headline make the biggest impact on your Linked search engine optimization.
These are the same things that we covered in this guide.
You can check for yourself using other keywords that you consider buzzwords in your industry.
You’ll find that it follows almost the same principle. People who optimize these particular aspects of their profile almost always appear first in search.
There’s no other way of getting around it, LinkedIn search optimization is extremely critical in ensuring that you’re doing a good job with your brand/profile awareness efforts.
Takeaways
You’ve got to optimize your LinkedIn profile for search.
There’s no way you should miss out on this.
Remember, a majority of the time, people stumble upon your profile “passively” while they’re searching for it.
Stop giving them a hard time looking for you.
Search optimization is always given a bad rep for keyword stuffing and all of that.
However, it’s not like that anymore.
Algorithms are smarter so the more natural approach is always the best approach when doing this.
Achieving the right balance between proper keyword placement and natural-sounding text isn’t that difficult.
The sooner that you do this, the sooner you can get an improvement on the leads that are coming in.
Trust me.
