How to improve your LinkedIn business page

LinkedIn isn’t just for job hunting. It’s an enormous hub that brings employees, customers, clients, colleagues, and businesses together. Specifically, almost 800 million accounts are active on LinkedIn, making it an incredibly powerful tool for your business. 

This article will outline some helpful tips for businesses to improve their LinkedIn business page.

In particular, we’ll cover these specific LinkedIn features and how best to approach them:

• Headline
• Titles
• Experience
• Recommendations 
• Summary / About section
• Profile picture
• Background image
• Connections
• Keywords

For more information about using LinkedIn for your business, check out our article, “How to find freelance clients on LinkedIn”.

The headline on LinkedIn is often a missed opportunity for business profiles. 

By default, the headline will describe your business title, describing who you are. Instead, change it to describe what you do. Write about the kind of work you do, using specific terms that will appear on job searches. 

For example, rather than having your headline read “Online English Tutor”, be more specific and descriptive by writing “Expert English tutoring for natives and second-language learners.” 

The headline is also a great place to mention your experience and qualifications. 

Along with your headline, your title is taken into account on LinkedIn’s search algorithms. For that reason, your business profile must have a title that will attract as many people as possible. 

Try to avoid niche industry terms that potential clients might not know about. For example, while the purists in the baking industry might refer to their business as a “patisserie”, most people will probably be looking for a “pastry chef”. 

Remember, you have 100 characters to use in this section, so you can be more specific if you like. It’s all about casting a wider net for online searches, so as long as you consider that first, you can use the other characters to mention your fancy french influences. 

Again, this section can be easily underutilised. It’s important to mention the work your business has done, yes. But don’t just mention the jobs or the companies. Talk specifically about what you’ve done for them. 

What did you actually do, how did you do it, and how did it help the client?

This is one of the best features that LinkedIn is known for and can be a huge boost to your profile. Of course, the more you have, the better, as long as they’re genuine and relevant. 

Don’t just wait around for people to recommend you though, be proactive and start asking clients or other businesses you’ve worked with to write you recommendations. Most people will be happy to do it. 

If there are specific things you’d like them to mention, don’t be afraid to ask. In fact, it’s a lot easier to write a recommendation when you know what you’re supposed to be recommending. 

The about section is your opportunity to show your personality while describing what you’re about in more detail. 

Here are some tips for the “about” section:

• Write in first person. 
• Write about the specific work you do and why you’re good at it. 
• Keep it genuine and authentic.  
• Mention why you’re passionate about the work you do.

Remember, this section is about sounding human and approachable. At the end of the day, people like doing business with people, not businesses. 

As any good marketing executive will tell you, images tend to have a larger impact than text, so using the right images will have a profound effect on potential clients looking at your profile. 

For the profile picture, most businesses use their logo. That’s fine, but remember to include profile pictures of you and your employees in the “people” section. 

As a general rule, profile pictures should be:

• Recent pictures, no more than a year old. 
• Headshots against a plain background.
• Well lit.
• Warm and engaging. 

On that last point, smiling is always great, but not essential. Just make sure everybody looks happy to be there. 

The background image is another unique opportunity to say something about your business. Try to choose something that reflects your unique brand, or something that’s related to your industry. 

Make sure you use a good quality image with a high resolution. And remember, the background image is set directly behind your profile picture, so avoid an image that will clash.

Connections are the lifeblood of sites like LinkedIn. It’s basically what the whole platform is geared towards. 

LinkedIn’s algorithm uses your connections and mutual connections to prioritise different search results. 

LinkedIn recommends about 300 to 500 connections is a good number, as long as they’re relevant and have decent networks of their own. Luckily, the platform usually recommends connections to you every week, so expanding your network isn’t all that difficult. 

Like any other social media platform, one of the best ways to increase your visibility is to produce engaging content. It’ll help you appear more often on newsfeeds and build your reputation as an expert among your connections. 

The key to producing good content is making it original, authentic, and insightful. Don’t steal other people’s ideas, but feel free to share them and offer your own opinions. 

Along with producing your own content, take time to engage with other content too. It’s a great way to strengthen your existing connections for more opportunities later on. 

Try to check your newsfeed for about 15 minutes every day. Update your status, reply to comments, and engage with other posts that you find interesting. 

Finally, like most algorithms, LinkedIn relies on keywords to rank search results, meaning they read different profiles and match them to user searches. So, getting the right keywords will help funnel more potential clients to your LinkedIn business page.

First, find out what key terms and phrases your target audience is searching for. Once you know what people are searching for specifically, you can include more keywords throughout your business profile page, ensuring you’ll appear higher in search results. 

This practice is sometimes called search engine optimisation (SEO). For more information about how to use SEO, check out our article, “The beginner’s guide to small business SEO”.

Using LinkedIn for your business can make professional networking a whole lot easier, so why not do the same for your financial management? 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.