Summary:

Put the name of your city (in text form) somewhere in your LinkedIn profile.  Otherwise, you may not be found in searches.

Details:

LinkedIn training tip – put the name of your city in text somewhere in your profile

That’s right.  As unnecessary as it sounds, make sure you put the name of your city in the Summary field or in some other part of your profile.

Why is the tip important?

If someone goes to LinkedIn and uses the Search People function (in the upper right hand corner) to look for

accountant boston

because they are looking for an accountant, it won’t find most accountants in boston.  Why?  Because LinkedIn remembers your location based on your zip code (sort of).  It does not put it in text format.  Regardless, the search won’t find your profile unless you have the word boston somewhere in your profile.

Therefore, if you want potential customers or potential hiring managers to be able to find you, this tip should give you an edge over your competition if they are looking for someone in your city to help them in their business.

The proof, if you care

To test and prove this, do a search for

patrick o’malley boston

You will probably see 4 profiles in the results, and all have the word Boston in their profile.  Oddly, the other 3 aren’t from Boston (but went to Boston schools).  However, each has the word Boston in text somewhere in their profile

If you repeat the search and remove the word boston, just searching for patrick o’malley, you will see over a hundred matches.

Now click “Greater Boston Area” on the right hand side, it will filter those who actually live in Boston (based on zip code), and there are 11 of them.   However, none of them have the word Boston in their profile, so they wouldn’t be found in the search above when the word boston is added to the search.  LinkedIn only knows that they are from the “Greater Boston area” because it internally remembers their zip code, but won’t match that when you do a search for the actual word boston.

The important thing for you to know is that you should put the name of your city in the Summary field of your profile (or somewhere else) so that you appear in search results for your name and city, or more importantly, for your occupation and city.  Try it for your name and city.

Cool, huh?

If you want to see me talking about this as one of my “hot undocumented tips” in a keynote speech, see the video below.  Its not a funny clip, but it is a 60 second version that I gave one of my audiences:

Notes:

• I used to be the #1 match for Patrick O’Malley, and now I’m not in the first 10 pages.  If you want to see a funny blog entry on it, click http://www.the-linkedin-speaker.com/blog/2009/08/27/linkedin-search-people-function-changed-sort-order/
• One of the matches in the above search is a woman, but she worked for an organization with “Pat” in the name