I have said it before and I will say it again: Optimising your LinkedIn Profile is essential for anyone who wants to optimise their career. Showcasing your value proposition both to the market and internally is increasingly becoming a basic requirement. If you are about to meet new clients or collaborate with new colleagues, there is little doubt that they will have a look at your Profile before meeting you and beginning to form a view. You might consider taking charge of how well your Profile represents you. Furthermore, even if you are not looking for a job now, you might want to have career-changing options put in front of you by making yourself more findable and having a clear message that recruiters want to engage with. Indeed, ensuring that your LinkedIn Profile is easy to find is a key component of optimisation - finding and using keywords in your Profile is possibly the most important way to achieve that. Here are some ideas on how to do that:
- Find the right Keywords. There are a couple of ways to do this. First, type in good guesses into the search bar (top left) and then click on ‘People’. See who comes up and if they are similar or the same as what you want to found for, you have found the right ones. Keep going and find more.
- Type in the same keywords and then click on ‘Jobs’. This will take you to a range of job ads. You can now read through the text of the ads and note those keywords that not only describe your position, but also the skills and attributes that they are looking for. For example, I typed in ‘Portfolio Manager’, clicked on Jobs and found some ads. In those ads, I repeatedly found language such as: “Project Delivery, Account Management, Business Development and Commercially-focussed mindset”, and so on. If the words and phrases that you find fit with your value proposition, you can use them for inspiration.
- Where should I put the Keywords? The short answer is throughout your Profile with a particular emphasis on your Headline (the description beneath your name), the About section and your Experience section.
- Consider changing your URL. If you have not edited your URL, it will look something like this: linkedin.com/on/joe-blogs-456123b. You can easily edit it and put a keyword in there to make your Profile more findable. For example: linkedin.com/in/stephenjawright-careeer-coach
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- Don’t forget the Skills section. Many recruiters use more powerful versions of LinkedIn such as LinkedIn Recruiter. This has additional search capabilities, which includes being able to search for specific Skills. So you might want to make sure that you have the skills that you want to be found for scattered across your Profile, as well as in the bespoke ‘Skills’ section. Note that this is capped at 50, so make sure that you are prioritising the most important and relevant skills to your industry. If you haven’t updated your Profile for some time, then make sure that the skills you are have still relevant and encourage your network to endorse you for these.
- How much? It is a good idea to sprinkle the keywords lightly throughout your Profile but not too much and without losing an easily read and accessible flow to your text. We don’t want it to be too try hard, lumpy or awkward.
- Test. We know that LinkedIn is not a single return search platform so, with that in mind, a final step is to get friends and colleagues to input your chosen keywords and see if you come up. See how yours performs once you have made these changes. This should be a good indicator of whether your Profile is sufficiently optimised to help maximise your job search success.
If you’re looking to update your LinkedIn Profile, but are unsure of how to go about it or simply to do not have the time to do so, we have a bespoke LinkedIn Profile Service. Our experienced CV and LinkedIn Profile writers will work with you to ensure that your LinkedIn Profile mirrors your CV and accurately portrays the value that you bring to the market. Click here
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