Using LinkedIn for developing relationships, getting new business, building links, and fun.
People often wonder if LinkedIn is a necessary form of social media. Job seekers wonder if companies actually check their LinkedIn profiles, companies wonder whether their connections on LinkedIn make any difference in Google searches, and I’m sure you are wondering how it benefits those of us involved in SEO? The answer is, we can use LinkedIn as a tool to help our current clients and gain more clients.
1) Make Connections for Your Business
LinkedIn is another tool that will get your name out to those who may be interested in your services. It’s important to build a company profile as well as a personal profile, both can be used to meet clients. Like Google+ or Yelp, there is room for clients to praise the experience they have had with your services in the “recommend” space on your profile. The more recommendations you have, the better you look to possible clients. It is important to connect with clients you have already worked with in hopes of getting recommendations and also important to connect with others in your arena.
I did a search for “SEO” which gave me others in my field. You can get more specific with your searches, listing “SEO Austin” or your own city search term to find the heavy hitters in your area. It is always good to grow your network within your field and certainly looks good to potential clients. This gives you more legitimacy when you start connecting with them.
Once you feel you’ve built a solid LinkedIn page for both your company and yourself and have made important connections, it is a good idea to search for companies you feel might benefit from your service. Look for similar companies to your previous clients and before connecting, message them examples of what you’ve done for those clients, how you got their numbers up, and what you might be able to do for the company you’re making the connection with. You could even see who your client is connected to on LinkedIn to gain more clients.
2) Make Connections for Your Clients
As we know, a huge part of SEO is content partnerships–Getting viable links from other websites to your clients. Since LinkedIn is all about connecting, what better place to build content partnerships? Blogs get a high volume of e-mails per day, especially if the blog has an info@blog.com address, it might be challenging to get a reply from one of the editors to get your content up. With the high volume of SEO pros also looking to get their content and links up LinkedIn is a valuable second outlet to make connections with bloggers and get your content up.
It’s a good idea to do the research for content partners outside of LinkedIn, then use LinkedIn to connect to those that might be able to get your content up on their sites. Search for the specific website you are looking to connect with and if the current employee has position listed as writer, editor, blogger, blog manager, or something to that extent, there is a good chance they are involved in getting content up on the site.
It is beneficial to add them as a connection, then either use the e-mail they have listed on LinkedIn or send them a personal message on LinkedIn about a content partnership with their site. Sending the message via LinkedIn instead of E-mail will probably be refreshing and get your idea noticed faster because the volume of e-mails with people looking for link content partnerships is so high.