LinkedIn SEO: 6 Tips To Enhance Your Company’s LinkedIn Page
Want to stand out on LinkedIn? If you do, LinkedIn SEO can help you enhance your company’s LinkedIn page for more visibility.
Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash
Having an optimized LinkedIn page can do wonders for your business. LinkedIn can help with your marketing goals, expand your reach, and attract top talent. Also, clients and customers will trust your company more if you have a strong LinkedIn presence.
What Does Linkedin SEO Mean?
LinkedIn SEO involves optimizing your profile to improve its search ranking on the platform. This is desirable as you want people to discover your company’s LinkedIn profile easily.
Like other social media platforms, LinkedIn uses an algorithm to display appropriate content for a particular search term. You need to fulfill the algorithm requirements to get your content displayed.
LinkedIn SEO is quite similar to website SEO. For example, targeting the right keywords is crucial in both. Like your typical website SEO, you’ll also need to incorporate your target keyword at strategic places within your LinkedIn profile. For instance, you can add keywords on your tagline and the about page. More about this in a bit.
6 Ways To Improve Your Company’s Linkedin Page
Improving your company’s LinkedIn page means optimizing it for what LinkedIn’s algorithm wants to see. Complete profiles with optimized profile URLs are the bare minimum, but there’s plenty more to consider.
Your regular SEO knowledge will come in handy here, as LinkedIn SEO involves keywords and backlinks. Also, naming images correctly and publishing SEO-focused content is important. Let’s break down these tips.
1. Complete Your Profile
To optimize your LinkedIn profile for SEO, you need to ensure every single field is filled out. The more information you have on your profile, the more searches you can appear in.
Use plain language and write accurate information with descriptive keywords when possible. The idea is to find the balance between keywords and an interesting profile.
Bullet points are your friend, too, as they break up information and make your profile more readable.
A professional profile picture is important as well. The image needs to be high-quality and highlight your company—your logo is usually the best option. Also, you need to choose a good cover photo.
A good cover photo needs to be high-quality and highlight your company, but you can’t use your logo again. As you have more space than a profile picture, you can add a call to action or tagline.
Take a look at Moz’s LinkedIn cover photo for a good example.
The cover photo has an appealing design element and color scheme. Also, the tagline indicates what the company can do for the user. Don’t waste this valuable space by keeping the generic cover photo; users are more likely to engage with you if you have a unique cover photo, as it shows you are active on the platform.
2. Optimize Your Profile URL For Search
Changing your profile URL is an easy tip to enhance your Linkedin SEO. By default, a LinkedIn profile URL may look like this:
The URL is long and includes irrelevant SEO information like random numbers and text. Here’s what an optimized LinkedIn profile URL looks like:
The URL contains the company name and nothing else. Having a URL like this means you are more likely to be found in a search.
Changing your URL is very easy. Here’s how to do it:
- Select the ‘Me’ icon at the top of your LinkedIn page
- Select ‘View profile.’
- Select ‘Edit public profile & URL.’
- Select ‘Edit’ from the ‘Edit your custom URL’ tab.
- Type your chosen custom URL and click ‘Save’
If your company name is taken, don’t worry, you can still optimize your URL. If, for example, your marketing company is called ‘Element Choice,’ you could use ‘Element Choice Email Marketers’ as the basis of your URL.
3. Name Your Images Properly
Search engines and LinkedIn don’t just consider text but images as well. If you name your images properly, your profile will likely appear when users search for terms from your image name.
So the images you upload to LinkedIn need to be named properly. Use descriptive but appropriate keywords for your images.
For example, if you’re using your company logo for your profile picture, don’t just call the image ‘[company name] logo. Use industry-appropriate terms like ‘[company name] awarding winning marketing services.’ Users won’t see the image name, so don’t worry about repeating keywords, for example.
A LinkedIn blog post revealed that the optimal image length should be between four and seven words. Also, the blog recommended avoiding jargon, so use plain language.
You also need to ensure your alt attributes are optimized, as LinkedIn SEO accounts for them. Alt attributes are alternative text for images. An effective alt attribute describes an image using keywords.
The image above could have the alt attribute ‘man giving a marketing presentation.’ The text describes the image and includes the keyword ‘marketing.’
4. Add Relevant Keywords
Just like with regular SEO, LinkedIn SEO requires relevant keywords. However, search engines and LinkedIn use keywords differently.
Unlike regular SEO, LinkedIn SEO just looks at two variables: the number of times a keyword is used in a profile and where the keywords rank in a search engine. So the amount of times you use a keyword and the keyword’s rank is the main consideration when selecting keywords.
You can identify your keywords by asking your company’s marketing department; they should be able to supply you with a list of keywords they target. But if you are a small company and don’t have a marketing department, you can use tools like Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner to find appropriate keywords.
Another good way to identify relevant keywords is to see what your competitors use. There is no exact science to utilizing keywords for LinkedIn SEO, so your competitors may have found keywords you’ve missed. You will already know who your competitors are, so you can just look them up and see what keywords they use.
But it’s also a good idea to search for industry-specific terms followed by ‘LinkedIn’ and see what comes up, as your main competitors may not have optimized their LinkedIn profiles. By doing this, you can check other companies that are competing with you on LinkedIn.
Once you’ve identified your keywords, you need to add them to your profile. You’ll want to spread them out and include them in every section. There is no evidence that keyword stuffing is penalized on LinkedIn, but you still want your profile to be engaging.
5. Publish SEO-Focused Content Often
As with regular SEO, your LinkedIn SEO will improve if you publish SEO-focused content often. Aside from being SEO optimized, make sure the content is relevant to your industry and that there aren’t already hundreds of posts on the same topic.
You don’t even need to write new content every time; your blog should have lots of appropriate content you can use. Just use SEO softwares like Surfer to ensure the content is optimized for the correct keywords before publishing it.
Consistency is key with this method. Create an appropriate posting schedule to make sure your LinkedIn profile is constantly updated. You can post between 2-5 times per week. But make sure you don’t duplicate content, as this can harm your LinkedIn SEO.
The best way to publish a blog on LinkedIn is by posting an excerpt using the ‘start a post’ feature.
You can then link the rest of the blog after the excerpt using a call to action. By doing this, you will drive traffic to your website as well as improve your LinkedIn SEO. Your post will also have more clicks and rank higher due to LinkedIn’s high domain authority.
Another top tip is to check out your competitors’ LinkedIn content and see what kind of content performs best. LinkedIn is its own ecosystem, and certain types of content may be unexpectedly popular. For example, if you are in the software sphere, you might look at this piece of successful content for inspiration.
If you find a particular type of content that performs well within your industry, try writing that style of content to get results.
Also, posting native content on LinkedIn is much better for SEO than resharing. LinkedIn’s blog states that the difference in engagement is around 10-15%.
6. Build High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are a big factor in LinkedIn’s algorithm for page rank. So building high-quality backlinks is an effective way to enhance your LinkedIn SEO. Having high-quality backlinks will also increase your page views and interactions, increasing your LinkedIn SEO score.
You can create high-quality backlinks by adding your LinkedIn profile to content like blog posts and articles. Here’s an example:
The blog’s author has included a button that links to their LinkedIn profile. Linking like this means you are more likely to get more traffic to your LinkedIn profile.
But it’s important to remember a backlink is only high quality if it comes from a source with high domain authority. Hopefully, your company website has a high domain authority, so you can link from there.
But you’re not limited to building links from your website alone. You can also link to your LinkedIn profile through guest posts.
You see, most websites allow blog contributors to include links in the author bio. For example, they may let you add one link to your website and another to your LinkedIn or Twitter page. They can also let you choose between the two. Use this opportunity to link to your LinkedIn profile from websites with high domain authority.
Here is an example.
The above screenshot comes from a guest post published on the ClickUp website. ClickUp is a popular DR (domain rating) 85 website. The guest writer took this opportunity to link back to their LinkedIn profile from the author bio, using their name as the anchor text.
One can also switch and use their company name as the anchor text and link to their LinkedIn profile. Brands use this technique not only to increase engagement and visibility but also to get more followers on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social platforms.
You can do something similar with your guest posts. In addition to securing high-quality backlinks to your website, you’ll also improve the visibility of your LinkedIn profile. Essentially, you’ll achieve two goals with a single link-building campaign. Pretty clever, right?
In Closing
With these simple practices, you can greatly increase your chances of showing up when people look for your company’s LinkedIn profile.
If you generate more traffic to your LinkedIn profile, you will gain exposure for your brand, make more connections, and boost your brand’s reputation.
So don’t miss out on these opportunities and make the most out of your LinkedIn profile; you can be sure your competitors are! LinkedIn SEO might just be the social media marketing strategy that achieves your business goals and takes your brand to the next level.
