You get only 2 seconds to convince your visitors about your relevance. If you fail, the visitor clicks the back button and leave your site for good. Here’s how you can stop it.
Are you tired of having an ordinary profile on LinkedIn? It’s time to revamp your profile and optimize it for better visibility. As a matter of fact, having a professionally optimized and updated profile on LinkedIn improves your chances of getting hired. LinkedIn offers you a unique opportunity to put up a professional profile and optimize it for better visibility.
So you already have a LinkedIn Profile? Let’s take a look how to optimize it.
Your Profile Description
A LinkedIn profile description allows exactly 120 characters to be used for writing your description. While 120 characters are very few to write an appealing description about yourself, you can still make them count.
Your prospective employers use the niche industry keywords to find their vendors on LinkedIn, and hence, it is very important to ensure that your LinkedIn profile is properly optimized with those keywords. Think of a way to use those keywords wisely to build your profile description.
Your Past Experience
Your past experience critically decides your odds of being hired. Like your off-line resume, your LinkedIn profile should also focus only on your relevant experience within your industry. You might have worked across several industry verticals, but your prospective employers care only about the experience you have in the niche industry.
Take your time to describe your experience in each company in a way to bring out the key skill-sets and their benefits to your past employers. Be sure to use industry keywords within your text while writing your past experience to improve its searchability.
Recommendations
Even though your Linked profile says you have a great deal of experience in your niche industry, your experience and expertise should be backed by a few recommendations from your past employers or clients you have worked for. Although recommendation is a natural by-product of your past performance, acknowledged by your past employers, colleagues or clients, it is perfectly okay to politely ask for recommendations from them if you haven’t already gotten any.
Alternatively, you may just recommend them on LinkedIn to share your experience of working together with them in the past. Your efforts are more likely to be rewarded with positive acknowledgement, i.e a recommendation.
Websites
Most LinkedIn users don’t really know how to use this section to their greatest advantage and prefer to use a very generic strategy. However, this section enables you to showcase your skills within your niche industry.
Moreover, you can adopt smart ways to optimize this section to help your LinkedIn profile stand out. This can be done in the following ways:
- Edit your default settings on this section, and choose the ‘other’ option. Upon choosing the ‘other’ option, it enables you to insert your own text and a link of your choice alongside the text. The text can be used as anchor text to guide your visitors to your preferred landing pages.
- Use your creative ideas to make the text appealingly relevant to your prospective employers. For instance, you can say ask a very pertinent question to your visitors, using the link alongside to answer the question. Take a look at the following example:
It immediately brings your profile relevancy to the attention of your prospective employers thereby offer them a chance to go through your websites and other critical credentials. Essentially, this helps you demonstrate your skills before your prospective employers as soon as your profile shows up before them.
How Does An Optimized LinkedIn Profile Help?
On LinkedIn, the biggest of all challenges is to help your LinkedIn profile show up in the results whenever your prospective employers search your services on LinkedIn. When you optimize your LinkedIn profile with relevant industry-specific keywords, you have an increased chance of appearing in the search results on LinkedIn. So, the first job is done.
Now, when they visit your LinkedIn profile, you need to make an impression within the first couple of seconds. An optimized LinkedIn profile serves this purpose by offering a very appealingly relevant profile and other essential credentials to your prospective employers.
Feel free to write to us if you want to know more about how to optimize your LinkedIn profile.
I really enjoyed your article! I often tell my clients that it’s not enough to simply copy and paste your resume into LinkedIn! You need to write for your reader AND the search engine. Keywords are important! Pepper them throughout your profile paying close attention to the headline, summary, specialties, job title and experience description sections.
I hope to see more articles from you regarding LinkedIn Profile Optimization.
–Donna, LinkedIn-Makeover.com