Boost your profile: Tips to come to the top

Sadly there are many people now looking for meaningful work, including me. I’ve been investigating how to raise my profile with hiring managers or recruiters here on LinkedIn.

In my previous article, I talked about the initial steps I took to investigate how my profile was being found and the changes I made.

These steps were:

1. Define the search criteria you want to be found by?
2. Discover how people are currently searching for your profile?
3. Brainstorm your keyword list?
4. Raise the visibility of your keywords in your profile
5. Assess the impact

In this article, I'm giving an update on how these changes are impacting on my LinkedIn performance and the changes I will be making in the coming week.

Assessing the impact of my changes

So the first step this week - look at my search appearances. You can access this from your profile page.

Observations

1. Keywords are more relevant for the roles I’m seeking, but not a perfect match
2. Search volume is low, in fact possibly the lowest since starting my LinkedIn optimization
3. Most searchers are from my previous employer (Microsoft)

See the postscript for the latest results - they're shocking!

Refining my Niche

With my original "niche" as Digital Transformation and Employee Experience, I was on the third page of search results when those results were filtered to the Greater Seattle Location. While this wasn't bad, most people won't look past the first 10 or so people. The objective is to get onto the first page. Increasing the number of keywords would likely improve the search results, but I realized my niche is too broad & I needed to bring my niche into more focus. While I have a lot of experience in Digital Transformation & Employee Experience, I realized I was ignoring my Microsoft Azure experience (I'm certified...). So using the search term "Digital Transformation" AND "Employee Experience" AND "Azure", I was in the top 10 search results! [OK, only just at #8 but I was on the first page ??]

So this was a great refinement of my Niche and is giving me focus on how I need to be presenting myself to recruiters & hiring managers.

Next Steps in Improving my Results

As part of the unemployment program here in Washington State, we have access to many workshops & seminars. One workshop I attended this week was on "Advanced LinkedIn", delivered by the awesome Georgia Duffy. I'll cover more of her tips in another article, but the headline changes I need to make on my LinkedIn profile are

Profile Changes

• Title [Appears under your name] ?
• About Section - Add specialties to boost keywords ?
• Google Action words for resumes to create accomplishment statements in the most recent 3 roles. This page was a great resource.
• Only go back 10-12 years. Save your work history for your tailored resume.
• Update your public profile URL [and include it in your email signature]

Meghan Fasano also showed in her recent post that your page banner is a great place to include your headline specialties. She even posted a PowerPoint template for you to use!

Here's my updated About section:

So I've done the first two of these suggestions and I'm going to be doing the rest this week & I'll update you all on the impact.

February 2023

#digitaltransformation #employeeexperience #azure #openforwork #linkedin #layoffs

PS:

I checked my past week's search results. These reflect my original changes & not the changes in this article. I was surprised!

You can see in these search results I am actually starting to be found for searches matching some of my keywords. So it may take time for your profile to reach the search you're targetting.

Also, you can see I'm starting to be found by resourcing firms.

I'm hopeful that this week's optimization will further improve the quality of LinkedIn performance on my behalf.