2026 Edition | Based on current LinkedIn guidance and Bubbly Consulting’s experience in digital strategy, SEO, content and personal brand positioning.
Your LinkedIn profile is more than an online CV.
For professionals, it is one of the first places a prospective customer, employer, business partner or industry contact will encounter you.
LinkedIn profiles can appear within LinkedIn search and, depending on your visibility settings, in external search engines including Google and Bing.
Optimising your profile means making it immediately clear:
- Who you are.
- What you do.
- What you know.
- Who you work with or help.
- Why someone should trust you.
It also means using the terminology that people actually use when searching for someone with your expertise.
This guide takes you through your personal LinkedIn profile from top to bottom.
1. Define your LinkedIn strategy
Before you change your headline, rewrite your About section or add new skills, decide what you want your LinkedIn profile to achieve.
Be strategic about how you want people to find you.
For some people, this will be very specific. A doctor might want to be found for a particular clinical specialism. A Construction Manager might want their profile to establish expertise in a particular type of construction, project or sector.
For others, their professional value spans several areas. A business leader, entrepreneur or consultant might want to be recognised for a combination of leadership, sector experience, commercial expertise and specialist skills.
Start by asking:
- Who do I want to find me?
- What do I want them to find me for?
- What would they actually search for?
- What expertise do I want someone to associate with my name?
Define your priority search terms
Once you understand your strategy, create a shortlist of the terms that accurately describe your role, expertise, sector and specialist knowledge.
For example, someone working in structural timber might prioritise:
Primary expertise
- Structural timber
- Timber frame
- Offsite construction
Professional expertise
- Business development
- Construction
- Housebuilding
Specialist topics
- Modern Methods of Construction
- MMC
- Timber frame design
- Affordable housing
Someone working in healthcare might instead prioritise terms such as:
- Healthcare
- Clinical education
- Medical education
- Surgical education
- Healthcare leadership
- Clinical leadership
The objective isn’t to include as many keywords as possible. It’s to establish a clear and accurate picture of your professional expertise.
Once you’ve defined your priority terminology, use it naturally throughout your profile; including in your headline, About section, Experience and Skills.
This gives every section of your LinkedIn profile a job to do: reinforce the professional positioning you’ve deliberately chosen.
2. Profile picture
Your photograph is one of the first things people see, and instantly gives people an impression of who you are.
Use a recent, professional photograph that clearly shows you.
LinkedIn requires a profile photograph to reflect your likeness rather than a company logo, product or other image.
What to do
Use:
- A clear head-and-shoulders photograph.
- Good lighting.
- A simple or appropriate background.
- An image that still works when displayed at a small size.
- A photograph that reflects how you would reasonably present yourself professionally.
Avoid company logos, group photographs and images where your face is difficult to identify.
LinkedIn currently accepts JPG or PNG profile images, with dimensions from 400 × 400 pixels upwards.
Your photograph isn’t primarily a search optimisation tool. Its job is recognition and credibility.
3. Background image
The large banner behind your profile picture is valuable professional real estate.
Don’t leave it as LinkedIn’s default background if you have something useful to communicate.
LinkedIn recommends a background image of 1584 × 396 pixels.
4. Headline
Your headline is one of the most important pieces of copy on your profile. It appears directly beneath your name and can also appear alongside your name elsewhere on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn explicitly allows you to rewrite the automatically generated headline to promote your expertise.
Don’t waste it on a job title alone.
Instead of: Managing Director at ABC Ltd
Consider: Managing Director | Structural Timber | Timber Frame | MMC | Housebuilding
Or, where a customer proposition is more important:
Commercial Director | Helping Housebuilders Deliver High-Performance Homes with Timber Frame
The right approach depends on why you use LinkedIn.
Here’s a useful formula:
ROLE | SPECIALIST EXPERTISE | SECTOR / CUSTOMER | VALUE
You don’t necessarily need all four.
If being discovered for a particular professional specialism matters, use the terminology someone searching for that expertise would recognise.
Don’t invent clever alternatives to established job titles purely to sound distinctive. LinkedIn itself recommends standard job titles because they correspond more closely with the terms people actually search.
5. Location and industry
Check both. These fields are easy to overlook but help LinkedIn understand your professional context. Select the industry that most accurately reflects your work and use an appropriate professional location.
This becomes particularly important when location is relevant to the opportunities you want to attract.
6. About
Your About section should not read like a third-person corporate biography. LinkedIn describes the About section as the place to communicate your mission, motivation and skills.
For business leaders and subject-matter experts, we recommend answering five questions:
1. What do you do?
Establish this as priority.
2. Who do you do it for?
Name the industries, organisations or audiences you work with.
3. What are you particularly knowledgeable about?
This is where your priority areas of expertise should appear naturally.
4. Why should someone believe you?
Experience, results, qualifications, organisations you’ve worked with, projects, sector knowledge or other relevant evidence.
5. What should someone do next?
Connect, contact you, visit your website or speak to you about a particular subject.
Here’s an example structure:
I have spent more than 20 years working across the structural timber and housebuilding sectors, helping housebuilders, developers and contractors deliver residential developments using offsite timber frame.
My experience spans timber frame manufacturing, business development, MMC, affordable housing and large-scale residential development across the UK.
As [ROLE] at [COMPANY], I work with customers from the earliest stages of a project, helping teams consider design, programme, manufacture and erection before key decisions become fixed.
I regularly work with housebuilders, developers, main contractors and design teams on [relevant areas].
If you’re planning a residential development or would like to discuss timber frame, connect with me here or contact me at [details].
The keywords are present, but the copy still sounds like a human being wrote it.
7. Experience
Make sure your current role reinforces your professional positioning, and don’t treat the Experience section like a graveyard of old job descriptions.
LinkedIn’s search tools can use skills and terminology contained within position descriptions as evidence of a person’s expertise.
For each important role that makes up your experience, include:
- What the organisation does
- Your responsibility
- Your areas of expertise
- Commercial or professional outcomes
Instead of: Responsible for business development and managing key accounts.
Try: Responsible for business development across the UK housebuilding and construction sectors, working with housebuilders, developers and contractors to identify opportunities for offsite timber frame.
My role includes early engagement on residential projects, supporting customers through specification, design development and procurement, and developing long-term relationships with major housebuilders and construction partners.
Important point: Connect each position to the correct LinkedIn company page where one exists. And be as accurate as possible. LinkedIn requires Experience entries to represent genuine professional relationships with the organisations named.
8. Skills
LinkedIn allows you to add up to 100 skills, and its search and Recruiter systems use explicit skills as well as skills inferred from the wider content of your profile.
That does not mean you should add 100 vaguely relevant skills. Choose skills that reinforce what you genuinely want to be known for.
Where LinkedIn offers a standardised skill matching your expertise, use it.
LinkedIn also allows skills to be associated with specific Experience entries, providing additional context about where you have demonstrated them.
Your connections can endorse skills, which LinkedIn says can strengthen your profile and increase the likelihood of discovery for opportunities related to those skills.
9. Featured
Think of Featured as your evidence section.
It allows you to put selected work, content and professional proof prominently on your profile.
Depending on your LinkedIn account/features, this can include content such as posts, articles, external links, documents and selected profile items.
Useful things to feature include:
- A strong thought-leadership article.
- A major project.
- A case study.
- A presentation.
- A report or industry guide you’ve written.
- An interview or podcast.
- An important media feature.
- A company proposition or service.
- A significant professional achievement.
Choose a small number of items that reinforce the expertise you’ve established elsewhere.
Don’t use Featured as a dumping ground for everything you’ve ever published, and don’t rely on it for search optimisation, as Featured content is not discoverable through search. Its role is conversion rather than discovery.
Someone has already found you – now show them why they should take you seriously.
10. Recommendations
Recommendations provide something you cannot write yourself: third-party evidence.
Ask clients, colleagues, managers and professional partners who genuinely know your work to provide recommendations.
Be specific when asking.
Instead of: Would you mind writing me a LinkedIn recommendation?
Try: Would you be comfortable writing a short LinkedIn recommendation about the work we did together on [project], particularly your experience of [relevant expertise/outcome]?
This often produces a much more useful recommendation.
Prioritise recommendations that validate the professional positioning you’re trying to establish.
If you want to be known for strategic leadership, five recommendations saying you’re pleasant to work with aren’t as useful as one explaining how your strategic input changed an organisation.
11. Licences, certifications, projects, publications and other sections
Use these sections when they strengthen your professional positioning, but don’t feel like you need to fill them out if they’re not relevant to you.
LinkedIn currently supports additional profile sections including:
- Licences & certifications.
- Projects.
- Courses.
- Publications.
- Honours & awards.
- Volunteer experience.
- Languages.
- Organisations.
For subject-matter experts, researchers, academics, clinicians, engineers and other technical professionals, sections such as Publications, Projects and Certifications can be particularly valuable.
12. Contact information
Make it easy for the right person to take the next step and get in touch with you.
Review your Contact Info and add the professional information you’re comfortable making available. Depending on your circumstances, that could include:
- Company website.
- Professional email.
- Other relevant web links.
Check the visibility settings for your contact information rather than assuming everyone can see everything you enter.
13. Customise your LinkedIn URL
LinkedIn allows you to customise the public URL associated with your profile. Rather than retaining an automatically generated URL containing unnecessary characters, use a clean version based on your name where available.
For example:
rather than:
linkedin.com/in/jessica-mcandrew-83927481
LinkedIn specifically recommends creating a personal URL as one way of promoting your public profile in search-engine results.
It also looks considerably cleaner when included in an email signature, biography, CV or website.
14. Check your public visibility
Optimising a profile for search is pointless if you’ve inadvertently restricted who can find it.
Go into: Settings & Privacy → Visibility.
Then check your public-profile settings.
LinkedIn allows you to control which sections of your profile are eligible to appear to people who aren’t signed in and in external search engines such as Google and Bing. Decide how visible you want to be based on your own privacy requirements.
If external discoverability is an objective, make sure the relevant parts of your public profile are available.
Remember that changes won’t necessarily appear in Google immediately. LinkedIn warns that external search engines can take weeks or even months to reflect changes.
15. Don’t optimise your profile by stuffing it with keywords
This isn’t SEO circa 2005.
Repeating key terms over and over again doesn’t make for a good profile.
LinkedIn’s own search technology looks at information across multiple areas of a profile. That gives you an opportunity to build a consistent picture of your expertise rather than repeatedly forcing the same phrase into your copy.
16. Your LinkedIn profile optimisation checklist
Before you finish, check:
Positioning
- Have I identified the subjects I genuinely want to be known for?
- Does my profile make my expertise obvious within seconds?
- Am I using the terminology my industry actually uses?
Introduction
- Professional profile photograph.
- Relevant background image.
- Clear, keyword-relevant headline.
- Correct current position.
- Correct industry.
- Appropriate location.
About
- Explains what I do.
- Explains who I work with.
- Includes my principal areas of expertise.
- Provides evidence of experience.
- Gives the reader a next step.
Experience
- Current role is properly explained.
- Important previous roles contain meaningful descriptions.
- Relevant industry terminology appears naturally.
- Roles are connected to the correct company pages.
- Claims and associations are accurate.
Skills
- Important skills have been added.
- Skills support my desired professional positioning.
- Relevant skills are connected to Experience where appropriate.
Evidence
- Strong work or thought leadership is Featured where the feature is available.
- Relevant recommendations are visible.
- Certifications, projects, publications and awards are included where useful.
Discoverability
- Contact information is current.
- Public LinkedIn URL has been customised.
- Public-profile visibility has been reviewed.
- External search visibility reflects my objectives.
One final test
Search for the professional expertise you want to be known for, then look at your own profile and ask:
If someone looking for this expertise landed on my profile today, would they immediately understand that I’m the person they’re looking for?
If the answer isn’t yes, your profile isn’t finished. A well-optimised LinkedIn profile shouldn’t simply tell people where you’ve worked. It should make it clear what you know, what you do and why that matters to the people you want to reach.
Bubbly Consulting is a boutique digital marketing agency and management consultancy, with expertise spanning digital strategy, SEO, content, thought leadership and social media. We help ambitious organisations grow. Email hello@areyoububbly.com to speak to us directly.
LinkedIn features and functionality change regularly. This guide reflects information available at the date of publication.
