A LinkedIn Company Page That's Optimized Will Boost Your Visibility and Business

Did you know that creating a LinkedIn Company Page can boost your business by increasing your visibility? It's true! I love me some LinkedIn. The free version is so powerful, it's completely misunderstood and woefully under-utilized.

A lot of folks think it's just a giant database to list your jobs and accomplishments to someday move to another job. There is that element, and it's a good one. But I want to talk about using a free service from LinkedIn that highlights your company and showcases your products and services. Oh, and we're going to optimize it with keyword phrases that your target audience uses so that your page shows up higher in LinkedIn searches.

Ready? Let's get started then! As always in SEO, what are we going to start with? Keyword research - of course!

Use your favorite tool to find keyword phrases that fit your business offerings. Develop a list of about 10 - 12, especially specific ones for your products and services. You'll see why in a minute.

OK, now navigate your way to your LinkedIn profile. Wait, you do have a LinkedIn profile, don't you? Here are the basic rules:

• You must have a personal LinkedIn profile set up with your true first and last name.
• Your profile strength must be listed as Intermediate or All Star.
• You must have several connections on your profile.
• You're a current company employee and your position is listed in the Experience section on your profile.
• You have a company email address (e.g. john@companyname.com) added and confirmed on your LinkedIn account.
• Your company's email domain is unique to the company.

Note: A domain cannot be used more than once to create a Company Page. Because domains like gmail.com, yahoo.com or similar generic email services are not unique to one company, those domains cannot be used to create a Company Page. You might consider creating a group if your company doesn't have a unique email domain.

OK, now that we know that...go to your profile. Move your cursor over Interests at the top of your homepage and select Companies.

Click Create in the Create a Company Page box on the right.

Enter your company's official name and your work email address. By the way, your email address needs to match the company. In other words, you can't use your all purpose gmail account, sorry!!

If the email you use is unconfirmed, you need to wait until it's confirmed in your LinkedIn profile to move forward on this page creation. Be patient, they'll get to it. Once that's done, you can get this going.

OK, now it's time to open up your keyword list. Referencing the image below, first pick the language you're going to create the page in.

Next, enter your company name as it exists for branding purposes.

Company description - Here's where you're going to use your preferred, main keyword phrase that you want your business to get found for in LinkedIn searches. Think of this as a giant, giant meta description, because you get 2000 characters to describe your company!

I suggest you take some time on this and draft several versions. Optimize it with your keyword phrase, employing keyword prominence and proximity. Make it a good one - there's no excuse for leaving something out when you've been given 2000 characters.

Moving down the page, you can add three images for your business:

The big one at the top is really, really fussy in terms of the size. You may need to re-size several versions before you get one that fits and is still clear.

OK, your next opportunity for keywords is in the specialties area. You can choose multiple specialties to show up for. Be comprehensive! Use keyword phrases that describe what you do.

Moving up and to the right, fill out the data fields with your business information:

When you've done all this, click on the "Publish" button right above these data fields. Assuming you have not already done this by following along, now you're ready to create a LinkedIn company page that'll get your business more visibility for finding business partners, sales opportunities and more!

LinkedIn has some helpful information about creating your page - you can read about it here.

Next, I'll show you how to create optimized show case pages that are part your company page to highlight individual products and services you sell.

Want to learn more about how to optimize your social media platforms and streams? Join us in an advanced SEO course for this information and more! Or, learn how to do SEO in our online course.

Until we meet again, keep it between the ditches, umkay?

All the very best to you,

Nancy McDonald

Image courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org