Get your profile to the top of LinkedIn’s search, LinkedIn’s Search algorithm dissected

I have spent my career building and optimizing search engines for multiple billion dollar eCommerce companies.  I recently found myself looking for new employment.  In an effort to better position my profile in LinkedIn’s search results I thought I would do some analysis to figure out how their search engine works.  My analyses came back with 5 basic components that end up being extremely important in LinkedIn’s algorithm.  After my optimization, and before I posted these findings, my profile views went from an average of 13 per week to over 60. 

This article is geared towards helping people understand how to do internal LinkedIn SEO (search engine optimization).  I know I am breaking marketing rules about length of posts so I have decided to summarize the output at the bottom of the post for those people who are in a hurry.  Those of you who are not, I hope that the extra insights provided will be well worth your extra few minutes.  Either way, please comment and let me know what you think!  

Before you start optimizing your profile you need to identify when and where you want to show up.  Write down what titles of positions you would be interested in, and what searches hiring managers and recruiters might search for to find the ideal candidate for that position.   A really good way to get help with this would be to ask a recruiter what they would search for to find a person for the defined role.   Once you have that list, you now need to optimize all of your searchable content to support it.   There are some fields that are much more important than others like: current and previous titles, location, and company.  Fill them out well; you can follow my guidelines below which will help you understand which fields are searchable and how heavily they influence LinkedIn’s search results. Additionally it will describe other factors that LinkedIn’s search solution takes into consideration as well as my recommendations for optimization.   

Your Profile’s Content and how it affects LinkedIn’s Search

Current & Previous Position Title – Weighted very highly.  I would argue that this is your most important field, and would strongly recommend that you use the 100 characters to its full potential.  Don’t just say “project manager”; you should include as many of the descriptive words (which you identified earlier) as you can to describe your position (providing it has relevance to your current position).   For example instead of project manager I might say “Project Manager, ecommerce customer experience for checkout, cart, and post-order”. 100 Character Limit.

Additionally I have confirmed that LinkedIn will handle both title forms, abbreviated and full, in exactly the same manner; so my recommendation would be to abbreviate it (VP over Vice President) if you’re missing descriptive words in your title that would otherwise force you over the 100 character limit. 

Location – When searching for a position, your location plays a huge part in determining your profile’s rank in both normal search and advanced search.  Make sure that your location is set to where you want to find a job.   For example if you want a job in Silicon Valley and are willing to relocate there at no cost, change your location to Silicon Valley.  You will have a much, much higher likelihood of surfacing.  I have spoken with many recruiters about their searching habits and most of them confirm that location plays a huge role in their search.  Their first pass is almost always to find local candidates, and then they expand.

Company Name – It’s important that when you’re adding a company that you currently or previously worked for, you select from LinkedIn’s auto-fill options, otherwise when a recruiter is using advanced search and they filter down to see who has worked at a certain company you will not show up through the filter.  This feature is regularly used by recruiters when they are looking for specific positions.  Oftentimes hiring managers will give a recruiter a list of companies that they want the recruiter to look at for the position.  100 maximum characters. 

Profile completion percentage – the percentage of your profile that is complete also tends to help out above and beyond just having more searchable fields filled out.  They seem to put a slight boost on the profile completion score.  So go through the steps to complete your profile… it will help.  

Non-text factors for search

Connections count - make sure that you have as many connections as you can.  In Linkedin’s search algorithm a moderate weight seems to be placed on the people who are closest to you.   Proactively reach out to recruiters and connect with them.  Additionally, you should accept anyone that reaches out to connect with you.  The more common connections you have with a searcher (recruiter or hiring manager) the higher your profile will be in the results when they search words relevant to your profile. 

Recentness of communication – This one is harder to measure for sure, but it seems that the regularity or recentness of your communications with each person does have an impact on your profile’s position within their search results.  Therefore if you reach out to the recruiters regularly your profile will more likely surface in their searches of LinkedIn.  

Behavioral Interaction – This one can be rather important; it’s the measurement of how often your profile is clicked on when it shows up in search.  The more often your profile gets clicked on in a search result, the higher your profile will show up in those results later.  This means that your profile will display higher just by getting more clicks when it does show up. 

How do I affect that?  Again, your job titles end up being the heavy hitter here.  Nothing else, other than company, connections & shared connections display in the search results.   I can’t emphasize this enough, make sure that your job titles are as descriptive and accurate as possible. 

Recommendations – Apart from being required to have a 100% complete profile, the content in your recommendations are not searchable.  This means you don’t need to ask your connections to put specific words in their recommendations strictly from a find-ability perspective.  Of course it’s a good idea to make sure that your recommendations are talking about the skills that are needed to be successful at your ideal job.  

Does your number of profile views affect your position in search results? – I have done several analyses on this and I can confirm that if there is any weight put on how many profile views you get, it is much lower than most other fields.  I think the only value that monitoring profile views provides is to give you feedback on whether changes you have been making to your profile, to improve your find-ability, have worked. 

LinkedIn Premium – I have not seen any evidence to suggest that your accounts premium or lack of premium status affects your position results in search. 

Fields that are searchable but don’t carry much weight:

These fields are generally what I would consider meta fields, or supporting fields from a search engine perspective.  Their weighting is very low so they are kind of used as a tiebreaker.  Think about it like this.  If you are a VP of sales and another guy is also a VP of sales, the engine will look at which one contains the words VP and sales the most in the supporting fields, adds them up and gives a very slight boost to the winner.  Although this boost is slight it can end up being the difference between position 1 or 20 if most of the rest of your content is similar. 

Summary Field–This field is searchable but is weighted much, much lower than most other fields.  Think of it as a tiebreaker field.  Rely on this as a filler section to support what your title says, but do not think of it as a leg to stand on by itself.  Generally this section should be used more as a conversion tool.  Once you get a viewer to your page, this section sells them on why they should stay or contact you.  2,000 character limit.  

Position Description Field –Although searchable, this field is weighted fairly low.  This field should not be relied on to describe what you do.  Your title should do that.  There is little chance that you will surface to the top of a search result from this field unless it’s something that is seriously unique to you.  200 minimum and 2000 Maximum Characters. 

Overall Summary: As promised, here are the 5 steps that you can take to increase your profiles position in LinkedIn’s search results.    

Make sure you:

1. Adequately and accurately describe your position in your title fields. These are the most important fields for both getting found in search as well as getting clicked on.
2. Have as many connections as possible
3. Have your location set (where you want to get a job)
4. Select your company from the autofill option when stating who you currently and previously worked for
5. Communicate regularly with the top recruiters, even if it’s just to say hi

Feel free to reach out to me with any site search, or general eCommerce optimization related questions.  Please, follow, comment and share, I will be writing new posts in similar areas in the near future.

Take a look at my latest post "It's not the size of your data, it’s how you use it" in this article I talk about leveraging data to personalize your website and provide helpful hints on how to inexpensively personalize your search results.