How to optimise your LinkedIn profile

Your LinkedIn profile is a landing page, and most people treat it like a form they filled in once and forgot. It works around the clock whether you tend to it or not: buyers check it before they reply, recruiters search it, and anyone who sees your name in the feed clicks through to decide if you are worth following. This is the checklist to make that page do its job, from the photo down to the part everyone skips.

Work top to bottom. Each section has one job, and a couple of them decide almost everything.

Start with the three things people actually see

Before anyone reads your profile, they see your photo, your headline and the first two lines of your About. In search results, in the feed, on a connection request, that is the whole first impression. Everything below the fold only matters if these three earn the click.

• Photo: a clear, well-lit head-and-shoulders shot where your face fills most of the frame. It does not need a studio. It needs to look like you on a good day, and to be recognisable at the size of a coin.
• Banner: the strip behind your photo is free advertising space most people leave as the default blue. Use it to state, in a few words, what you do and who for.
• Headline: the single most-read line on your profile. More on that next.

Write a headline that says who you help, not your job title

Your headline follows you everywhere your name appears, so waste it on your job title and you waste your best line. The reliable shape is who you help + the outcome + how. “I help B2B founders turn LinkedIn into pipeline: content strategy and ghostwriting” beats “Senior Manager at Company” every time, because it tells the right person they are in the right place.

It is also a ranking signal. LinkedIn search leans on your headline heavily, so include the words your audience would actually type. There is a full walk-through, with before-and-afters you can copy the shape of, in how to write a LinkedIn headline. You get 220 characters, but only the first 40 to 50 reliably show on mobile and in search, so front-load your point. Our free LinkedIn character counter has a Headline mode set to that limit if you want to see exactly where yours gets cut.

Rewrite your About section for the reader, not your CV

The About section is not a biography, it is a pitch written to one person. Open with a hook in the first two lines, because that is all that shows before the “see more” fold. Then, in the first person, cover who you help, the problem you solve, the proof you can point to, and what to do next.

Keep the paragraphs short. A wall of text gets skimmed and skipped. You have 2,600 characters to play with, and the same character counter has an About mode so you can keep it tight. Close with a clear next step: follow you, message you, or check the link in your Featured section.

Put keywords where LinkedIn search reads them

Being findable is a deliberate choice, not luck. If your clients search “fractional CFO” but your profile only ever says “finance leader”, you will not appear. LinkedIn weights your headline, your About and your Skills most, so make sure the exact terms your audience uses, your role, your niche, your industry, appear naturally in those three places.

Then fill your Skills list with the ones that match how you want to be found, and reorder them so the important ones sit at the top. Keep it human throughout: a profile stuffed with keywords reads as spam to the person you are trying to win.

Prove it with Featured, Experience and recommendations

Once someone is sold on the top of your profile, the rest is there to remove doubt. Pin your best work, a case study, a talk, a popular post, to the Featured section so it sits high on the page. Write your current Experience entry as a short value statement rather than a list of duties. And ask two or three clients or colleagues for a specific recommendation, because a real sentence from a real person does more than any self-description.

This is the same principle that governs personal branding on LinkedIn: show, do not just claim.

The step everyone skips: keep the profile alive

A perfect profile with an empty feed is a shop with the lights off. When someone lands on your profile and sees your last post was eight months ago, the polish stops mattering. Regular, relevant posts are what prove you are active, keep you turning up in the feed, and back the promise your headline makes. If you are not sure what to post, start with what to post on LinkedIn.

That consistency is the hard part, and it is exactly where WordPush helps. It hands you post ideas pulled from your industry every morning, turns a moment from your week into a post in your own voice, and schedules it, so the profile you have just optimised stays as active as the day you finished it.