This article was written by Liesse Jayalath , director of creative and content strategies for Look Left Marketing .
The other day I was doing research for a client and I Googled “2023 DoS webhook attacks” (yes, I write awesome nerdy stuff for clients). This is a very specific query that I hoped would return a list of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks that have happened in the last six months. Although I didn’t get my stat, I did get something else — a LinkedIn article.
If you don’t think about search engine optimization (SEO) 24/7, this may not mean anything to you. But if you do, you’ll know that LinkedIn posts generally don’t appear as Google results. I thought that maybe I had missed an announcement from LinkedIn saying that it’s now allowing content published on its platform to be indexed by Google. The thing is… there wasn’t one. What I found instead was a mix of user-generated opinion pieces and a mention of it buried in a blog from LinkedIn’s marketing team.
TL;DR: LinkedIn pages and articles are indexed by Google and displayed as organic search results. To save you the confusion of sifting through content on the topic, we’ve collected the most important things you need to know about using LinkedIn articles as part of your content strategy.
LinkedIn SEO tools do exist
LinkedIn recently introduced SEO tools that allow authors to add SEO titles and descriptions to articles. Here’s how: When you’re in the LinkedIn article editor, simply go to Settings in the Publishing menu and enter an SEO title (aka title tag) and SEO description (aka meta description).
Recommended by LinkedIn
Note that LinkedIn doesn’t support canonical tags at the moment, which means that it’s not a good place to repost content that was originally published on your website, as Google won’t recognize your website as the original publisher.
How to get LinkedIn posts to appear on Google
The term I searched for, “2023 DoS webhook attacks,” is such a small term that it’s not even indexed in SEMrush. And for obvious reasons — it’s pretty niche, as is the LinkedIn article that Google served me. Right now, we’re not seeing LinkedIn articles rank for terms with high difficulty and search volume (although this will likely change). For example, if we wrote an article around the term “Air Jordan,” which has 135,000 monthly searches, is highly competitive, and doesn’t have history built up on LinkedIn, it would be near impossible to rank for. For terms that don’t have much content written about them, like “2023 DoS webhook attacks,” anything well written on a notable site, like LinkedIn, has a good chance of showing up as an organic result.
Remember that in December’s “Helpful Content Update,” Google expanded its ranking system to reward quality content. Those content qualities are called E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Like any type of content, LinkedIn articles should first and foremost be valuable to the reader and comply with E-E-A-T guidelines. Here are some ways to ensure that your LinkedIn content does that.
Make an impression
LinkedIn has more than 930 million members and is the standard for online professional networking. Like any social media platform, you have to actively use LinkedIn to get value from it (if you reset your password every time you’re looking for a new job, I’m talking to you). To take advantage of the platform, you should keep your profile up to date, make new connections, like and comment on posts, and create original content.
Now that you know that LinkedIn articles are indexed by Google, you can leverage them to reach your personal network and the more than five billion people who use the internet. This function is still relatively underutilized on LinkedIn, but we expect it to grow, so consider yourself an early adopter. Of course you are, you innovator, you.
