Find here Daxue Talks 85. In this China business vlog, we have asked Julien Sicard and Tamar Hela from LinkedIn Local Asia (Shanghai), experts in LinkedIn especially for China, about SEO strategies on LinkedIn. In the face of competitors, what can companies do on LinkedIn to increase exposure?
Full transcript below:
What can you share about LinkedIn SEO? What are some tricks to make your profile show up in the China sphere?
The first point is to invite all the listeners to just type your full name on Google, so just Google your name and you’re going to see about 95% of the time you’re going to find your LinkedIn profile. Definitely LinkedIn in SEO is very, very powerful.
To answer your question, there are many ways to take advantage of the SEO on LinkedIn. The first point is obviously to rewrite the permalink of your profile. So, let’s say by default you have real numbers, so it’s not very optimized – so you have to rewrite your LinkedIn link appropriately. So for mine for example I decided to put my first name, last name, first name of my agency – that way whatever people – because obviously especially when I need to convince new leads for being my clients, they are going to stalk me right – so again by writing that in my LinkedIn profile, it will increase the probability they find out my LinkedIn profile.
Another point is repeating the keywords. The more you’re going to repeat the keyword in the hashtag of your posts, let’s say you’re a financial advisor, the more you’re going to repeat financial advisor when people are going to type financial advisor, and because LinkedIn has its own SEO, then there is the probability to be in the top three right because the rest we don’t care right, what we want is to be in the top three positions and be positioned in the keyword that we want. Then it’s going to increase again.
To sum up, the permalink needs to be changed. When you post, you need to find the relevant hashtag. So, point repeating the keyword in the summary, in the professional experiences, on your LinkedIn profile, that’s the way you’re going to increase your SEO and it works. I can give you many examples and a proper one. I teach here in one of the best universities in Shanghai – Jiao Tong University, I am a digital marketing professor. So for example we’re super interesting because obviously right now everyone needs a big institution like Fudan or big universities here, they’re like – foreign professor for the university students and it was funny because in one of my term in my professional experiences, it’s written professor of digital marketing, and I have maybe something – like 5 to 6 proposals of different universities from being a professor in the university. Proposals that I refused because I didn’t have time for that but just to show you again, let’s say – here in Shanghai there are lots of teacher okay, but what is interesting? Right now, the market (number of American teacher that are properly right now in China) are not that much and right now in June they’re thinking – okay we are going to recruit right, but yeah – and again, if these people, if their LinkedIn profile are optimised I’m telling you, all the school that would go on LinkedIn trying to find a new teacher because – okay, this is a bit optimistic for USA but we don’t know when it’s going to reopen again, so they have already to envision other ways. It’s again another way to show you why the SEO its super important and whatever you do – so definitely for a teacher, they’re in a position of negotiating what they want. Because the demand is high and therefore here in China it’s pretty low, so they can negotiate whatever income they want, and its super easy and especially again, if they are found in LinkedIn.
How does LinkedIn SEO work for articles and how can LinkedIn users increase the longevity of their articles?
Articles are low on the algorithm right now, maybe they’ll come back. There are rumors that they will, but for now – no. So, here’s what you can do. If you think it’s really important that you write an article or you feel like you have so much to share, you can’t summarise it in a post, make sure that that article obviously is adding value and showing your value, but more than that make sure it’s ever green, because what is nice about articles is they stay there forever and they are featured on your LinkedIn profile. You can also now use the feature carousel which you can choose what you actually want to feature, that’s really nice.
For example, I wrote about how LinkedIn local changed my life- literally like changed my life and grew me into the person that I am today in Shanghai. So, people when they go to my profile, they often read it and even over a year later I still get reactions, comments or people feel like they can connect to me just because of that article. So I would just really say – think more long term strategies with articles because they do have interesting posting and structural features, but – I know there’s someone in our community today who said – oh I’m going to write 30 articles in 30 days – sorry to tell you, but that’s just a waste of time.
So, think short content as Julian already pointed out. People are lazy, we have short attention spans, out attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish nowadays because we’re so bombarded by information, so think value, think evergreen and don’t focus so much on that, focus more on consistently posting short posts and even what we call micro content, by commenting on other people’s post which you can even do that for thought leaders in your industry or maybe in more big influencers and you want to be noticed.
Those are the two main contents to really focus on for LinkedIn.
How should content strategies for individuals and companies differ?
One of the biggest concerns as a company is to attract the best talent and right now one of the biggest concerns for the company is brand empowerment. In many companies, there is a lot of stress or abuse, so they need to use social media and the employees to show – okay it’s cool to work at Apple or L’Oréal whatever. So, I think the purpose is different. I think really it’s a big corporation, especially for the LinkedIn company pages. One of the greatest examples actually is a foreign director of communication of Decathlon, it was super interesting to show how okay Decathlon, we have a good spirit, we help each other. So it’s very different when you integrate the LinkedIn strategy to show that your company always has good results and individuals that are going to share more about, I don’t know other opinions, but definitely the company is going to be centered on the company’s individuals, they will share an opinion on more important topics, on more different topics and yeah that’s the main difference.
I would say we are talking more about brand empowerment for the companies. For individuals and especially for some entrepreneur or people that have a small to medium company that are more focused about delivering value, about their expertise, let’s say you’re an architect, okay – you go on to explain to me what are the new projects, what is the main basic of architecture, but not necessarily okay – how to make more happy and productive your marketing manager, I mean we don’t care – and definitely their strategy is different because you’re just a small or medium company and there is no point, your name is not Chanel. I mean obviously when you’re Chanel for example, you have all the luxury brands that are your competitors and obviously you’re going to take advantage of LinkedIn by giving this image of care, this picture that okay – working at Chanel is cool.
Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments, or send us an email – dx@daxueconsulting.com.
