There are currently over 875 million users on LinkedIn, rendering it the largest business-based social platform in the world.
So, it’s no wonder that large numbers of job applicants flock straight to LinkedIn when looking for new hiring opportunities and more information about the company they’re applying for.
In fact, 101 job applications are submitted via LinkedIn every second, making this platform one large hiring machine!
The question is, how do you make sure your business is seen first? With so many startups to compete against, it’s time to make sure your company sits at the top of LinkedIn’s social feed and quickly guides potential applicants straight to the opportunities you’re offering, and attracts potential customers to your business.
Stick with us as we jump into the world of LinkedIn SEO and give you ten tips on how to optimize your LinkedIn marketing in 2023.
How Does LinkedIn Rank A Business?
In the same way, search engine optimization can aid a website’s success, taking time to optimize your LinkedIn profile can be the difference between getting lost within a mountain of content and being a well-known business on the platform.
You don’t have to be a corporate giant with more than 100 employees to do well on LinkedIn, you simply have to know how to serve their ranking system.
Like Google, LinkedIn uses its own algorithm to determine where your profile appears in a list of searches. That’s why you don’t necessarily see the newest posts at the top of your feed when you log on. Instead of ranking content in post-order, Linkedin ranks content strategically based on two key factors. These are dwell time and the social selling index.
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Dwell time: This refers to the length of time a user spends interacting with a post/piece of content. The longer someone watches a video or scrolls through the comments, the more important LinkedIn believes the content is.
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The Social Selling Index (SSI): The social selling index is a lot more tricky to master. SSI relates to how established your brand appears and how connected it is with other brands/users on the platform.
Source: Metricool
This can include fostering relationships with other similar companies, having a wide web of connections site-wide, and actively interacting and engaging with insights. The higher your SSI, the better when it comes to LinkedIn’s algorithm.
Ten Ways To Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile For Business Success
- Start joining groups
- Prioritize keyworded content
- Optimize your images
- Try external backlinking
- Make sure your profile is complete
- Host your LinkedIn profile
- Widen your network
- Start sharing content
- Don’t forget about hashtags
- Link out to your company page
1. Start Joining Groups
One of the first things you can do in your journey to improving your LinkedIn SEO is to start participating in platform groups.
LinkedIn is full of group-post pages that are packed with expert opinions, skill dumping, and niche opportunities for thought leaders within the field.
While it may take time to sift through and find a group that is relevant to your business niche, it’s worth taking the time to do it. Joining a group boosts visibility and allows you to present your opinions and opportunities to an audience that actually knows what you’re talking about.
Better still, as you become more visible within the group, LinkedIn will view your profile as a thought leader. Not only could this improve your ranking, but it could also attract more traffic to your site blog and service pages too.
2. Prioritize Keyworded Content
In any SEO strategy, keywords are your recipe for success. In the case of LinkedIn, your titles and written content must be rich with creative and searchable keywords that will drive visitors to your profile.
For example, if you’re a marketing company that specializes in web design, make sure your content titles, service descriptions, and even your job opportunities contain the phrase ‘web design’. Prioritizing searchable keywords will make your brand easier to discover and increase viewer traction.
The key here though is not to keyword stuff. Only use keyworded phrases when they sit naturally within the content.
3. Optimize Your Images
It’s important not to forget about your images. Like Google, it’s essential to remember that search engines such as LinkedIn also scan image alt-text as well as other forms of written content.
So, if you’re looking to give your LinkedIn SEO that extra boost, it's time to start naming your images appropriately. Remove those numbers, and start using searchable keywords that could make your images discoverable to the right audience.
While viewers may not be able to see the title of an image, optimized alt-text could make sure your content still appears in a keyworded search. This could increase your exposure and boost your dwell time, all contributing to the promotion of your LinkedIn rank position with little to no effort.
4. Try External Backlinking
Not all LinkedIn SEO must be done on-site. Some of the best ways to boost your profile visibility and authority are to start sharing it externally.
If your business/brand has its own site blog, it's time to start linking out to your LinkedIn profile in any way you can. Whether you link to a relevant post on the platform or simply offer a fast pass to your homepage, this is a great way to draw in more viewers and increase your ranking score.
Better still, if you’re writing guest posts for other online publications, why not link out within that content too? Not only does Google rank external backlinks highly, but linking out to your profile in large publications opens up the opportunity to receive clicks from new demographics and viewers that wouldn't usually stumble across your content.
5. Make Sure Your Profile Is Complete
There’s nothing worse than an incomplete profile. It can make a business appear unprofessional and not on top of its game. Viewers need to be enticed by a company profile, if it is missing vital contact information and details about the company itself, most people will be likely to click off pretty quickly.
Make sure you’re also creating a company page, which can act as a sort of homepage for your LinkedIn profile and allow your viewers to learn about your company with ease.
Did you know that companies with a completed profile see up to 30% more views on average than a company with an incomplete profile?
If that isn't an incentive in itself, we don’t know what is.
6. Host Your LinkedIn Profile
Your host server is so important when it comes to optimizing your SEO success. Investing in a good web host provides a company with more audience analytics and a server that can host large influxes of traffic and still perform at optimum speed.
With advanced analytics, you can learn more about who is visiting your site and what content they love. This research can then be applied to the future content you create on LinkedIn, as your social media profiles are most likely to receive engagement from your site demographic.
If you’re creating more targeted content, your dwell time is likely to be longer as users engage and share the posts on your profile.
7. Widen Your Network
In order to improve your SSI, you need to appear established, connected, and well-known within your niche community. This means it’s time to start widening your network.
LinkedIn likes you to have as many connections as possible, as your connections alone make your brand appear authoritative when it comes to ranking. The key here though is to make sure the connections you make are relevant and not beyond your 3rd network.
Don’t just accept a connection invitation out of nowhere as a business. Think about what this connection adds to your network. Is it a business within the same industry that you could form a relationship with? Or is this a potential future employee with the skills and qualifications required to work within your company?
Build a network full of experts through leaders and professionals, as these will be the contacts that regularly interact with your content and boost your LinkedIn business page engagement.
8. Start Sharing Content
Content marketing is a recipe for SEO success. If you constantly publish relevant content that is related to your industry, you’ll quickly climb up the SEO ladder.
This is a great time to start sharing your own content too. If you have relevant blog posts up on your site, why not share them on your LinkedIn page? Not only will this improve your LinkedIn ranking, but it will send your viewer count soaring on your blog too.
Using a social media publishing tool like Statusbrew, you can schedule and publish content with minimal effort. If you want to prioritize consistency, you can use Statusbrew’s intuitive planner for SEO success.
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Better still, why not also encourage your LinkedIn connections to share your content on their profiles too? Ask questions with your content and give your viewers room to expand and answer in a share/comment. The more profiles your name appears on, the higher your authority will be.
9. Don’t Forget About Hashtags
While LinkedIn may present itself as a professional platform, don’t forget that it’s still a social network.
Hashtags may be more common on Instagram and TikTok, but they are also effective for LinkedIn marketing too. Hashtags can guide a viewer to a topic/area they want to learn more about.
If your content is hashtagged, these become active searchable keywords that can make your content discoverable for potential searchers. Make sure you hashtag skill buzzwords, job role titles, and current industry trend words for another chance to draw in more traction.
10. Link Out To Your Company Page
Last but not least, your company page is most likely the most important asset you have on LinkedIn. It contains your most recent content, your network of connections, your experience, opportunities, and contact details.
An easy way to link out to it is via your website. Adding a simple LinkedIn widget to the top or bottom of your site homepage provides site viewers with that final enticing push to click on your LinkedIn profile.
Great SEO is all about making it easy for the viewer. If they can click a button and be transported to a well-oiled page full of relevant content to explore, you’ll earn a potential connection and shift up in LinkedIn’s ranking algorithm.
See Your Profile Rise To The Top
With these steps in mind, it’s time to put your LinkedIn SEO strategy into action. With more job market competition than ever before, it’s essential that your business shows up first.
If you want to see your content fly up to the top of the feed, your content, connections, and company page are your ticket to success. To maintain consistency with content, there's no better place to start than Statusbrew. Creating content on LinkedIn doesn't get as seamless with advanced features like link preview customization and audience targeting.
Book a free demo today and see how Statusbrew can help you with publishing top-notch LinkedIn content consistently.
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