LinkedIn SEO guide: Optimizing your profile for more connections, better leads

In April 2022, LinkedIn announced that all Creators can add a link to the “Introduction” section on their profiles. This link appears below your name and description on your profile.

You can use this feature to add a link to your website, YouTube channel, online store, ebook, or whatever you want.

Experience section

The experience section is where I see most business owners getting lazy and treating their profiles like a resume. I used to do this myself. Not anymore.

Your experience section is another place to include LinkedIn SEO keywords and compelling copy that convinces users that you are the right fit for them.

You do this by writing each experience in a way that highlights what you took away from working at that company and the results you got for them.

Above is an example of how a LinkedIn user has used the experience section to include detailed summaries of her work at certain companies, the projects she was a part of and the results she generated through these projects.

For your profile, you can mention results like:

• The percentage increase in traffic generated for an SEO client.
• An uptick in conversions for a Facebook ads client.
• How you increased a client’s business revenue year over year.

Highlighting these achievements is a great way to show profile visitors that you have experience and can replicate those results for them.

I suggest writing naturally here rather than including a bulleted list of everything you have done. Hand-pick your best examples and make them super compelling.

Speak to what your potential clients are searching for and tell them how you can generate the desired results.

Top tips

• Add experience items for each of your top clients (and link to their company profile), describing the work you did and the results you generated for them.
• Use layman’s terms whenever possible. Don’t assume that your audience knows what “CTR,” “schema markup,” “KPIs,” “keyword cannibalization” or other industry terms mean.
• Remove any experience examples irrelevant to the audience you aim to serve. If you offer SEO services to law firms, they don’t need to know that you were a Boy Scout in sixth grade or a party chair at your college fraternity.
• Include references to any publications you write for or industry organizations you are a part of.

3. Implement LinkedIn SEO

LinkedIn SEO differs from regular SEO because the keywords users type in to find services and businesses on LinkedIn aren’t always the same as what users type into Google.

That’s because the average user doesn’t consider LinkedIn a search engine. They use it as intended – as a social media platform – and therefore use short-tail terms matching users’ job titles.

While users may use keywords like “copywriting services for small businesses” in Google, they are more likely to use terms like “copywriter” or “writer” on LinkedIn.

However, when users search long or short-tail terms in Google, LinkedIn profiles can rank in the SERPs. That’s why I suggest optimizing your profile with SEO keywords and what I call “LinkedIn SEO keywords.”

Finding SEO keywords

To find SEO keywords for your profile, simply conduct keyword research as you would if you were finding keywords for your business website.

• What do you want your profile to rank for?
• Do these terms get decent search volume, with low competition?
• Do they match the intent of your target audience?

These are all questions you’ll want to consider.

Generate a list of terms worth ranking for and with a reasonable search volume.

With this list, you will start on your LinkedIn SEO keyword research and optimize your profile with a combination of these terms.

Finding LinkedIn SEO keywords

Unfortunately, I have yet to find a tool that provides search volume data for keywords used on LinkedIn.

Therefore, this is not a hard science. But, if you are skilled in SEO, you can make some informed guesses about how keywords are being used on LinkedIn.

Here is my process for finding keywords on LinkedIn:

Step 1: Search for the shortest, broadest term associated with your services.

Use LinkedIn’s search box to search for the broadest term that applies to your business.

If you have an SEO agency, this would be “SEO” or even “marketing.” As a Facebook ads expert, this would be “Facebook ads” or “advertising,” perhaps “social media.”

LinkedIn will automatically show you a list of the top results for that term in your network (more on this later).

Step 2: Look at the full results.

Beneath the list of results, you will see an option to “See all results for [keyword].” Click on this to view the full results page.

This will take you to a page that shows you all of the results associated with this keyword, including the number of results, whether the results are connections, companies, groups, the location of the results and much more.

You will notice that the top results are likely connections already in your network – identified by a “1st,” “2nd,” or “3rd” degree connection annotation.

This means that you aren’t seeing the true search results, as LinkedIn prioritizes showing people and companies you have some existing connection with.

Our job is to determine which terms yield the highest volume and best match results across the board.

Step 3: Take note of the search volume.

Before moving on to the next step, note how many results your initial search yields.

You can do this by looking at the original total or by filtering it by people and companies. Do not add any other filters yet.

Basically, you want to know how many results are pulled when users search for that term to find people or companies that offer services like yours.

Step 4: See expanded results for first-, second- and third-degree connections.

Once you have recorded the initial “volume,” filter the results by ticking off the connection options.

Note how your keyword is being used in the resulting profiles.

Are profiles using “SEO strategist” or “SEO specialist?” Are they simply listing “SEO, SEM, SMM” or are they more specific? See if you can find any trends here.

Finally, determine which terms are the best match for the kind of traffic you are trying to attract to your profile.

In the example above, we can see that most of these profiles use the term “SEO” near the headline’s beginning, so we may also want to implement this. “SEO strategist” has also been used.

Make a list of these terms. Then, enter these terms into the search box again and see what results come up. Repeat this process until you have a list of the top 3-5 most used terms related to your initial “seed” keyword.

Step 6: Reference your SEO keywords list

Finally, you should compare your LinkedIn SEO keywords list to your regular SEO keywords list.

Is there an overlap? If so, keep these terms.

Are some terms being used on LinkedIn but may not be a great fit in the search engines? Decide whether you should replace this with a high-volume, low-competition SEO keyword.

Eventually, you will have a mix of terms that have the potential to draw in traffic both from LinkedIn searches and Google searches.

Adding LinkedIn and SEO keywords to your profile

Once you have a solid list of keywords, you will want to incorporate them into your LinkedIn profile.

Compared to Google, a plus side with LinkedIn is that there is no evidence that keyword stuffing is penalized here.

However, you want to keep your audience in mind and have your keywords fit into your copy compellingly and naturally.

Some areas to add keywords:

• Headline
• Summary
• Experience section
• Recommendations
• Skills section

If there are some regular SEO keywords that you don’t want to leave out, your Experience section is a great place to add these.

If you found trends regarding where these keywords were included in the top-ranking profiles, try to follow this in your own profile.

At the same time, don’t compromise if you think your profile copy is stronger by taking a different approach.

In section six, I address how to generate recommendations, skills and endorsements, plus how to add keywords to these sections.

4. Create a profile ‘funnel’

Wondering why copywriting is so important for your LinkedIn profile?

Well, it’s because your goal is to turn your profile into a funnel for new leads.

While many LinkedIn users rely on visitors to take the initiative and contact them via direct message, you and I will do things differently. We are going to make it stupidly easy for people to convert.

We’ll funnel visitors down the page – from your cover photo and headline to your summary, to your media section and, finally, to your inbox or landing page.

Photos and headline – Awareness

After visitors have read the text on your cover photo and in your headline, they should have a pretty clear idea about who you are and who you help. They will then make the decision of whether to learn more about you.

About – Interest

The About section is your chance to:

• Address any pain points they have.
• Communicate what your unique selling point is.
• Briefly cover the kinds of services that you offer.

This is where it’s super important to get your messaging on point, based on the market research you conducted earlier

Media – Decision

The media section on your LinkedIn profile allows you to add links to your website and blog posts or upload videos. This content can make all the difference in convincing visitors that you are the right fit for them.

While directing visitors to a page or post could be effective, this approach involves directing visitors off your profile.

There’s the chance of creating a bottleneck here, as visitors may drop off due to inconvenience or because it takes longer to read through text versus watching a short video.

That’s why I suggest adding a video to your media section instead. This video, again, should address the primary pain points your audience faces, communicate how you will help them and include a clear call to action.

If you do this effectively, you will build trust with your profile visitors and convince them to reach out to you directly.

Inbox or landing page – Action

The call-to-action in your video should tell visitors how best to contact you. This will likely be through LinkedIn direct message or your website. You may want to include a unique landing page for LinkedIn leads.

Your call to action should sound like this:

• “For x services, send me a message [on my website/through LinkedIn/through this link].”

Be specific about how visitors should reach you and what they should expect after they contact you.

“Send me a LinkedIn message for a custom quote” is much more compelling than “Visit mywebsite.com for more info.”

By creating a profile funnel, you are more likely to take advantage of the traffic coming to your profile.

Without a funnel, the burden is on visitors to figure out what you offer, chase down the details on your website, and figure out how to contact you.

A funnel makes the process straightforward, simple and conversion-friendly.

5. Build smart connections

While LinkedIn SEO and creating a profile funnel taps into the power of inbound marketing on LinkedIn, there’s another way to attract your ideal clients to your profile.

That method involves building connections with your target audience and professionals in your industry.

As we learned in the SEO section of this guide, LinkedIn prioritizes showing you your first-, second- and third-degree connections whenever you search for a keyword.

It works the same way for your potential clients. If you are connected with people in their network, your profile will likely pop up when they search for one of your keywords.

Therefore, the more industry connections you have, the better.

Making the right kind of connections

Many LinkedIn users connect with every possible person they can find (aside from the clearly spammy profiles).

While this has yet to be tested, I think this can potentially weaken your profile, as you will become associated with profiles outside of your industry, making it less likely for your profile to be associated with your target keywords.

Is it beneficial to be connected with loads of graphic designers in India if you provide legal SEO services in the United States? Common sense would say no. (Feel free to prove me wrong, though.)

I think it makes sense to build connections within your industry and the industries of your target audience.

As a legal SEO expert, that would mean connecting with other legal SEO agencies, digital marketing experts, law firms, law blog writers and the like. You can still get quite broad.

Be smart about the kinds of connections you want and how they could benefit your business in the short and long term.

Finding your target audience on LinkedIn

While connecting with other people in your industry is simple, you will want to put more time and energy into connecting with people who fit your ideal client persona.

If you have been in business for a while, you will likely already know what these people look like. They could be small business owners, tech entrepreneurs, SaaS businesses, Fortune 500 companies, law firms, etc.

Knowing this, you will simply use these identifiers to find profiles on LinkedIn that match.

If you are just starting out, you need to figure out what terms your target audience uses to describe themselves on LinkedIn.

You can do this by searching some general terms that you know about your audience (like “small business,” “contractor,” or “mommy blogger”) and seeing what comes up in the LinkedIn results.

Dig around until you find people that fit your ideal client persona, and take note of what terms they used in their headline and summary. Then, use these terms to find other people to connect with.

Connecting and saying ‘hi’

One of the reasons why LinkedIn has had a bad reputation for being dull and spammy is that many users use the platform to cold pitch their new connections. We aren’t going to do this.

Every time you extend a connection request to someone, send them a message introducing yourself and why you want to connect with them.

Remember – you are practically strangers. It will take a bit for them to trust you and determine whether the connection is worth it.

Rather than jumping into the pitch, follow scripts similar to the ones below (which have gotten me a near 100% response rate):

Networking script

“Hello [ name ],

Thanks for connecting. I see that we are both in the [ niche ] industry. I am an [ industry title ] myself. Are you working on anything interesting lately? Chat soon! – [your name ]”

This script implies that the person has already connected with you or may have extended the connection first. It creates a sense of familiarity versus making it seem like a random stranger is connecting with them.

It also gives a reason for the connection instead of leaving room for the person to suspect ulterior motives. They know what you do, so they can decide whether the connection is worth their time.

Finally, it prompts the person to respond by asking them about themselves. This puts the ball in their court.

And, if they happen to be working on a project that you could potentially help them with, it opens the door to having that conversation without you coming across as salesy.

Potential client script

“Hello [ name ],

Thanks for connecting. I see that you [ run a small business/have a law firm/are a tech entrepreneur/etc ]. I wanted to reach out because I [ help businesses like yours do x ]. Maybe there’s potential to work together. Are you working on anything interesting lately?”

Similar to the previous script, this script lets the person know who you are and why you want to connect with them and leaves it up to them to respond to you.

No pitch implies that you know how you can help them – you don’t yet – or start rambling about your services.

This keeps the conversation open and prevents the risk of you pitching them on one service when they may have asked you about a different service you didn’t think to mention.

Let the conversation flow more naturally, and they will likely ask you about services most relevant to them.

Another benefit of this approach is to avoid drawing in leads that may not be the best fit for you.

A final note about connections

Try to build as many connections as possible (following the process outlined above), or at least reach that “500+” mark.

This helps you build a more expansive network and appear trusted in your industry.

6. Gather recommendations, skills and endorsements

Again, LinkedIn SEO isn’t quite as measurable as website SEO, but that’s part of the fun.

Optimizing certain sections for keywords allows you to test what works and what doesn’t and develop your lead generation strategy.

The recommendations, skills and endorsements sections are all areas where you can add LinkedIn SEO keywords, but they don’t bring any hard evidence that says they move the needle in SEO. They may, however, move the needle when it comes to conversions.

Recommendations

LinkedIn recommendations are the “reviews” of your profile.

This is where references and past clients can talk about their experience working with you and the results you have gotten for them.

Skills

LinkedIn allows you to add a list of skills to your profile that tells visitors what you are best at.

This is another area where it may be smart to include things with your target keywords.

Endorsements

Endorsements are when other users endorse you for the skills on your profile. Again, this serves as social proof that you have the skills you say you have.

You can reach out to users on LinkedIn to endorse your skills to boost your numbers. You can also endorse users for their skills, which could prompt them to contact or endorse you.

It’s best to have many endorsements for just a few skills versus only a few endorsements for many different skills.

7. Post the right kind of content, consistently

LinkedIn has quickly evolved to reveal more SEO factors and capabilities than ever before.

And while many guides have been written on how to “hack” the algorithm, your success on the platforms really depends on what works best for you and your specific audience.

Your LinkedIn content strategy should incorporate different types of content – long-form posts, images, videos, shared blog posts, etc. – to see which ones get the best engagement.

The goal is to repeat what works, ditch what doesn’t, and revise your strategy to fit your audience and business.

One thing to note is that it is difficult to test your content’s success without consistency.

You should post different types of content multiple times throughout the day and then assess the results. If you are simply posting one short post per day, it’s unlikely that you will get any tangible data.

You may also want to look at what your competitors are posting and which types of posting are getting the most engagement there.

LinkedIn articles

LinkedIn gives an added algorithmic push to articles that are published on their platform.

In recent developments, LinkedIn allows you to customize how your SEO title and description will appear in search engines, making it even easier to improve your LinkedIn reach.

Think of some article topics relevant to your target audience on LinkedIn. Then, use LinkedIn’s own Articles function to write articles, optimize them for LinkedIn Search, and reach new users.

LinkedIn collaborative articles if you are eligible to contribute.

8. Give engagement, get engagement

Engaging with other accounts on LinkedIn is another way to expand your reach.

Whenever you engage in a post, your comment and name pop up on your connections’ LinkedIn feed.

You can also pop up as a second- or third-degree connection to users in their network, expanding your reach.

When users see your comment, they are likely to click on your profile to learn more about you. You can then reach out to these new viewers by requesting to connect.

These views are reflected by your notifications and in your LinkedIn analytics.

9. Understanding your LinkedIn analytics

No optimization guide is worth its weight without showing the results in terms of cold, hard numbers.

That’s why I was sure to test all of the LinkedIn best practices I encountered and any optimization hacks I came up with on my own.

I recommend marketers and business owners do the same, as LinkedIn optimization is still not cut-and-dry.

The success of your LinkedIn strategy depends on what works best for your target audience.

Post impressions, profile views, total followers and search appearances

LinkedIn offers you helpful data to see how your profile is performing. You can see:

• How many people have viewed your profile.
• How many have viewed your posts (i.e., impressions).
• How many people new people have followed you.
• How often you have appeared in the search results (i.e., search appearances).

You can also see who has viewed your profile (unless they have a protected account) and examine trends over time.

Since implementing my LinkedIn SEO strategy, I saw a 173% increase in profile views over 30 days.

A month later, my average number of profile views has been around 160 per day (following a sharp uptick when I posted more consistently in March). That is with very little posting or engaging on LinkedIn (roughly 1-3 times daily).

I have also grown my connections from 325 to 7,464, generating dozens of qualified leads every month.

These results have come from a process of near-constant testing. I have told others to implement micro-optimizations and analyze their LinkedIn analytics to see what is working and what isn’t.

Track your conversions

The goal of LinkedIn optimization isn’t merely more traffic and connections, though.

If you are starting your LinkedIn optimization journey, I recommend tracking how many leads you generate due to your efforts (LinkedIn does not track this for you). Only then will you truly know whether your strategy is paying off.

You can tap into your Google Analytics to see how many visitors you get from LinkedIn and then set up conversion tracking there.

However, if you direct users to your LinkedIn inbox, you must track this manually or with a bot.

The numbers don’t lie. Follow what works, and you will certainly see an uptick in connections, traffic, and leads over time.

10. Gain followers via Creator Mode

LinkedIn recently announced new tools to help creators like you increase discoverability and attract new followers. Note that you have to have Creator Mode turned on to access these features.

Followers from feed

Remember when I talked about how you gain visibility via connections? In Creator Mode, you don’t have to be first-degree connections to attract new followers.

Now, whenever a user sees your content in their Feed (via the algorithm), LinkedIn prompts them to follow you (via a “Follow” button) without them having to leave their feed.

Hashtags

LinkedIn has been utilizing hashtags to better surface content (and profiles) on the platform. Be sure to include hashtags in your profile and posts to make your content easier for users to find. When a user uses LinkedIn search to find topics, LinkedIn will match their search with people/profiles that regularly talk about those topics.

Connection requests

It used to be that someone sending you a Connection request would only result in a prompt to you, but that user would not automatically become a follower.

Now, whenever someone sends you a new connection request, that person becomes one of your followers – and your content will appear in their feed.

Turn your LinkedIn profile into a lead-generation machine

By following the LinkedIn optimization tips above and testing your own ideas for optimization, you can generate high-volume traffic to your profile and convert that traffic into qualified leads for your business.

The foundation of this strategy consists of:

• Conducting LinkedIn SEO keyword research.
• Optimizing your profile aesthetic.
• Building quality connections.
• Directing visitors through your custom profile funnel.

Afterward, make adjustments based on what works for your target audience and business model.

Are you making the most of your LinkedIn profile? If not, start today.