3 Tips to Make Your LinkedIn Company Profile SEO-Friendly

There are two ways in which people will search for your company, either through Linkedin or through search engines. LinkedIn is really just another search engine, except it only searches its own database of professionals and companies.

Many people use the LinkedIn search engine to research a company’s reputation, plus products, size and capabilities, especially in the B2B sphere. You don’t need to know much about Coke as a company to help you with your decision about buying a can of it, but if you’re about to choose a 100K software solution, you might want to know what other people think of the company. Search engines also view LinkedIn as a credible resource and so company profiles often appear in search engine results pages (SERPs), sometimes, right underneath your company website. So, we believe that optimizing your LinkedIn company profile for search engines—whether Linkedin or others—is a must. Here are 3 SEO tips:

1. Research and Apply Relevant SEO-Boosting Keywords

These keywords should be used in your company profile as well as your status updates. If you’re a large company, you might have some specific keywords that are more relevant for your company, while other keywords are more relevant for specific products. We suggest using both company and product related keywords throughout your company profile. The most important place to put keywords, according to LinkedIn is the tagline, which appears right under your company name. There’s not a lot of space, so make sure it defines who you are to your target audience and search engines.

2. Complete your LinkedIn Company Profile in Full

The company profile is your chance to shine. Don’t let this important real estate go to waste, and as mentioned above, make sure you include your most important keywords. As we always advise, write your profile with your target audience in mind and don’t overstuff your profile with keywords. Search Engine algorithms also understand synonyms and other variations, so don’t feel that you have to keep repeating the exact keyword or phrase over and over (and it’s best you don’t as it may lead the search engine algorithms to rate you negatively). Of all social media, most marketers identify LinkedIn as the biggest generator of B2B leads. Specifically for SEO, LinkedIn states that for the about section, beyond including relevant keywords, they recommend answering questions people might have, and suggest using the following framework:

Vision. What future do we want to help create?
Mission. How do we create that future?
Values. Who are we? How do we work?
Positioning. What makes our brand different?
Tagline. Our brand summed up in one line.
Products/Services. Here’s what we provide.

And of course, include a link to your website, so people can go and read more info about your product and services. LinkedIn also publishes best practices for Company Profiles, which we suggest you review their section by section guidelines and write or edit accordingly.

3. Share Lots of Keyword Rich New Content and Use Hashtags

As in standard SEO practices, we recommend that you continually share new content through company status updates. This will help keep you relevant in the eyes of search engines, plus it will help you pick up new followers. Both of which will help you build credibility and potentially increase your search rank. Just like you do for your blog posts, or new content for your website, you want to make sure your content is relevant to your audience and includes relevant keywords. Now, LinkedIn also auto-suggests hashtags when it ‘reads’ your status update content. We suggest you use either their suggestions or your own hashtags at the end of your status update, which will help search engines understand your content better and help people find you more easily.

This is not the first time we’ve written about LinkedIn, please check out our other blog posts:

Why Linked In? Because Professionals are Consumers too
3 Big Reasons to Advertise on LinkedIn