Why Relevant Keywords Are Essential To Your LinkedIn Success [Mini Case Study]
Do you get frustrated at the lack of people viewing your LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn Company Page? Are you confused why that chef from Indonesia has just checked you out on LinkedIn?
There is a good reason whey these things are happening - your LinkedIn profile does not contain the right content. It does not contain the relevant keywords that you want your audience to find you for, when searching on LinkedIn. Without these important keywords, you will rarely appear in relevant searches, and your foray into social recruiting won't be quite as successful as it could have been
LinkedIn is a complex (and sometimes scary) social network because of the sheer volume of information, data and functionality on the platform. However complex it is, LinkedIn can be broken down into three simpler functions of it's platform:
- Attraction
- Search
- Grow network (for search and attraction)
And what is the common denominator for all of these? >> KEYWORDS
Do YOU know the keywords that you want people to find you for on LinkedIn? Do you know what the best keywords are and what people are actually searching for?
- What do people use when they try and find people like you on LinkedIn? [Attraction]
- What do you use when you try and find people on LinkedIn? [Search]
- And how many of these keywords do you think they use when they do search on LinkedIn? [2 or 3 max!!]
- You are aware that the search engine on LinkedIn is (among other things), keyword driven?
- Were you aware people use the same searches on Google as they do on LinkedIn?
- Keywords can also be job titles
This is LinkedIn 101 - the basics you must know if you are going to make sure your profile is seen by all the right people. (You do know who you want to read your profile, don't you?)
Let me just give you an example of how powerful the right LinkedIn keywords can be
Over the last few weeks, this is one area where I have helped a number of my clients massively increase their profile page views over a couple of days! Here is a mini case study of what we did.
The client is a sector leading recruitment company. The existing LinkedIn profiles were very patchy, incomplete and 'fluffy' with lovely descriptions of their company (in the LinkedIn Summary and Experience sections), full of adjectives and descriptive phrases that mean nothing to a search engine. Phrases like, 'market leading', 'great place to work', 'dynamic' company', 'motivated consultants' etc etc. As I said - 'fluffy'!
So the first thing we established was, who were they trying to attract with their profiles? Candidates or clients, or both. Then we looked at all their industry keywords, and importantly, we then broke this down into which ones were a priority and they wanted to be found for on LinkedIn.Then using the FREE Google Adwords Keywords Tool, we ranked these keywords (and subsequent synonyms) in number of searches made in the UK. We now had the most common search keywords and synonyms being used for the industry keywords we had first set out.
Then we started again with the LinkedIn Summary and the Experience sections. Remembering they have a maximum capacity of 2000 characters each (so make sure you use it all!), we got writing. Tip: Don't forget the headline keywords either! We made sure that all the consultant profiles told people what they did, who they recruited for and the sectors they worked in - with the added bonus we now had ALL the keywords added in there as well.
We did the same for the company page (albeit with a slightly different strategy].
The results were immediate.
The consultants saw an immediate increase in their profile views - some as much as tenfold over the next two days.
10x more people viewed their Linkedin profiles after adding the correct keywords to their LI profile.Click here to Tweet this
This level of profile views then levelled out a little over the next few weeks, but stayed significantly higher than it was before we started. And as the keywords chosen were relevant to their industry, it was clients AND candidates that started to make contact with the consultants. This was a real accelerant to growing their LinkedIn networks.
The LinkedIn Company Page also started to get more visitors, both directly from search and indirectly from people clicking the company links on the consultant's profiles. This resulted in more people Following their company on LinkedIn (one of the primary objectives).Of course, there were other additional strategies employed around this LinkedIn improvement strategy like a content strategy, posting update strategy, sharing content, adding multimedia to profiles and marketing personal and company profiles better. But the fundamental building blocks around the success has been making sure the keywords were right in the first place, and were in line with the objectives of using LinkedIn as a core recruitment attraction and search tool.
Hopefully reading this post will motivate you to re-visit your LinkedIn profile, and check out your text and keywords (you may even update it!) Here are the action points you need to take:
- Understand what keywords you want to be found for.
- Work out the most important ones and their synonyms
- Add them across your LinkedIn profile including the Headline
- Add them to your Company Page as well (if you have one)
- Watch your profile views rise accordingly (if you have got the keywords right of course!)
If that is still proving a challenge for your company, then of course I would be happy to help 
Don't forget you can connect with me on LinkedIn here.
I work with recruitment agencies and corporates to help them helping them understand and leverage the different social media networks to improve their recruitment strategy, recruitment process, candidate attraction, employer branding and content marketing strategy. If you require guidance, advice or social recruiting training, get in touch today.
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