I’ve recently been writing some training on how to use LinkedIn to generate leads for your business. (Some people get all the luck!) In the course of my research, I discovered that most people do not know what to put in their professional headline.

Very quickly, your professional headline on LinkedIn is the ‘strapline’ under your name which appears whenever your name appears on LinkedIn. Simple to a business’s strapline, your professional headline is something which defines, at a glance, your personal brand. However, most people, let LinkedIn set their professional headline. I.e. they leave it as:

Job title at company

I don’t know about you, but my personal brand is much wider and bigger than:
“Chief Coach at The Efficiency Coach”

What about my book – ‘The Financial Times Guide To Business Networking’? My social media expertise? My business coaching experience? The value my services bring to my target market – professional advisors such as lawyers and accountants?

In case you haven’t read many of my previous blogs on LinkedIn, one of the very powerful reasons to be on LinkedIn – apart from its 100 million worldwide membership – is that Google ranks LinkedIn very highly, and normally returns your LinkedIn profile in the top three results when someone Googles your name.

Now, your professional headline is not only JUST read by Google and humans – it is indexed by LinkedIn’s own search engine. An important search engine in its own right. Therefore, you need to also add in some keywords which describe what you want to be found for.

To summarise, your professional headline needs to include a combination of:

1. What you do
2. The value you bring to your clients
3. Keywords which someone searching for a person like you may use
   After doing this research, I realised I had to change my own professional headline. Here is my professional headline:
   
   “Author of 'The FT Guide to Business Networking', Speaker, Business Coach, Social Media Consultant”
   Oh, and in case you didn’t know you only have 125 characters to write your professional headline...
   
   What’s in your professional headline?