Friday, October 23, 2015

Don’t Underestimate the Power of LinkedIn Search

YouTube will overtake Google this year in the search market. Video is king now that everyone has a smart phone. Just like YouTube, LinkedIn is often overlooked when it comes to the use of search online. 

And just as YouTube is still overlooked and underestimated by brands, if not by consumers themselves, as to how they market themselves digitally – LinkedIn is in the same spot.

Search works on LinkedIn just the same way as it works on Google, in fact the two go together! If you have spent time and effort on your personal profile on LinkedIn you not only increase your rankings on LinkedIn but you also improve your search rankings on Google too.

If you adhere to the rules of Google and implant many keywords throughout your profile they will get picked up by the LinkedIn search engine and your search will be optimised towards them. The same applies to Google. So let’s go deeper into what LinkedIn search can do for you!

 

Coming up on top

LinkedIn is a gamification platform. If you do all the things they want and update regularly, you will be effectively rewarded with improved search position on LinkedIn. The bonus is that you are also rewarded on Google, because as I said before – the two go together.

For example, if you type in “LinkedIn” into Linkedin, you get me! You also get 46,000 other people most of whom actually work for LinkedIn but I come up top. Why? Because I probably use the site more often and more times than anyone else who focuses on LinkedIn. What’s more, I have the “LinkedIn” keyword written so many times on my personal profile – in my summary, in my experience, and in my blogs – that Linkedin sees this and “rewards” my profile with higher search rankings.

The same thing happens with me being an event speaker. I use the term in my headline but I also created a separate experience section that details my experience of speaking engagements for companies, event and conference companies, and other organisations. This raises my ranking for people who want to find an event speaker on LinkedIn. Out of 4,000 people I come top for “event speaker” search on LinkedIn. Not rocket science just organic and all free.

This also applies to your company page. Which is why I can never understand why people 1) don’t have a company page on Linkedin (it’s free) and 2) why they don’t update it on a regular basis. Why not fill the top ten searches on Google with your company website (which ironically I use to purely drive traffic to my personal and company page on LinkedIn not the other way around), your LinkedIn personal profile and your LinkedIn company page?

By doing this you give people more reasons to engage with you, more reasons to socially buy from you, more benefits to doing business with you, more angles to want to work together. Putting in the effort on your LinkedIn personal and company pages will improve your search rankings on both LinkedIn and Google organically without spending a dollar.

 

Publishing on LinkedIn

It has now been more than a year since LinkedIn opened up its publishing platform to all members, a capability that was once exclusive only to a select group of ‘Influencers’ like Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama. Since then, LinkedIn members have been publishing more than tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of posts per week. LinkedIn engagement levels have gone through the roof, professionals on LinkedIn want to read engaging content.

So treat LinkedIn as your marketing partner for, like you, LinkedIn wants to drive additional traffic and more importantly engagement onto their website/app. Since acquiring Pulse in 2013, LinkedIn has transformed into a massive content engine where members actively seek out, discuss, and share advice and latest trends.

LinkedIn_publish

The other great benefit of posting your blogs on LinkedIn rather than just your own website is that they can also appear on Pulse under different headings like entrepreneur, leadership, and small business. This can also open up your blog to millions more people who share an interest or same background as you who then could also like and share it with their connections on LinkedIn or at the very least read it. This will ensure that your blog is seen, read, and shared by even more people.

LinkedIn is mobile-enabled and engages members with real-time notifications. LinkedIn even sends out eDMs that tell your followers when you publish something new and interesting. So why would you want to spend the time, money, and effort rebuilding a community when you can leverage LinkedIn’s of more than 364 million – one that is professional, targeted, and engaged?

Your latest three blogs on LinkedIn continue to sit on your LinkedIn profile and engage anyone new that you connect to. Research conducted by Econsultancy even proved LinkedIn sends nearly four times more people to your homepage at 64 per cent compared to Twitter (17 per cent) and Facebook (14 per cent). So make sure to share your content on LinkedIn!

 

Your turn!

What are you waiting for? Are you struggling to gain traction with your company blog? Try this: Re-post it to LinkedIn with a footer that says “this blog first appeared on www.yourcompany.com to cross-drive traffic to your company website. The beauty of LinkedIn is that every view, like, and share can be analysed and tracked.

There are also specific interest Groups where your audience has already been defined for you. You can share your blog there and attract a whole new level of professionals who you are not connected to but who are interested in the same area of business as you. If your content is thought provoking and engaging you will even become a Top Contributor of the groups with all the extra views that were brought in by your LinkedIn profile.

The other amazing thing about posting your blog posts on LinkedIn is the analytics. LinkedIn now tells you not only who viewed the post, liked it, and commented on it but it now analyses everyone who viewed it and break it down for you as to who they are. This includes the city they come from, the industry, the title of the viewer, and the traffic source. Your website and Google analytics can’t tell you any of that.

Skip all the heavy-lifting – LinkedIn has done all of that. Now sit back and watch the magic that the LinkedIn platform can do for you. Worth thinking about. It’s all free on LinkedIn.

What are your thoughts on search and publishing via LinkedIn? Share in the comments below.

 

ChrisJReedAbout the Author: Chris J. Reed is an official LinkedIn Power Profile. He is also a serial entrepreneur having created marketing businesses in both Europe and now in Asia Pacific with Black Marketing – enabling LinkedIn for you which now has offices in Singapore (HQ), ANZ, North America, China and Hong Kong, and the UK.

 

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