treasure chest Are you having trouble finding the best keywords to use in your profile? Are you struggling to find the right words to put in the search box when you're looking for new customers, great employees, or perhaps your dream job?
 
Well, you're not alone! But I'm here to help. It's a bit like a treasure hunt. It takes a little time, but it's easy if you know where to look. And the rewards are well worth the effort. You may hit the jackpot!

Where to Find Keywords on LinkedIn
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Your Competitors' Individual Profiles
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  • Headline
  • Summary
  • Specialties
  • Experience Titles
  • Experience Description
  • Skills & Expertise
  • Interests
  • Groups & Associations 
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Your Competitors' Company Pages
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  • Company Overview
  • Specialties
  • Insights Tab (most common skills of company employees)

Your Industry Groups
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  • Group Name
  • Group Profile Description
 
Research Your Skills on LinkedIn's Skills & Expertise Database
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Click the "More" tab on the top toolbar, scroll down, and then select "Skills & Expertise." In the Search box, enter a broad skill term like "accounting." 
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skills enter screen
 
 
This search will provide additional skills (keywords) you may want to put into your LinkedIn profile or include in your next Advanced People Search.  
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skills related
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If you want to try something that's fun (and potentially very helpful as well), try loading a group of the words you've found into a word cloud program. I use wordle.com
 
When I cut and pasted the words from the Skills & Expertise sections of five of my competitors, my results looked like this:
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wordle for linkedin trainers
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Greater prominence is given to words that appear more frequently in the source text. So you can bet I'll be reviewing my LinkedIn profile and attempting to include more of the words I see in the very large font!
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For more tips about keywords and searching, check out the following FREE downloadable resources on my website:
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  • LinkedIn Keyword Worksheet
  • LinkedIn People Searching: Your Ticket to Improved ROI

Have you found other great ways to identify the keywords that will help you hit the LinkedIn jackpot?