The short version: A strong LinkedIn profile answers “what do you do, who is it for, and why should I care” in the first five seconds, using a specific headline, a photo with a face that’s visible, and a Featured section that proves you deliver. It is not a CV rewritten in the third person, and it is not a beautifully written essay nobody scrolls far enough to read.
What people think a strong profile looks like versus what it needs
Most people picture a strong LinkedIn profile as something that reads like a magazine feature about them. Clever headline, poetic About section, maybe a humble-brag story about overcoming adversity. I’ve written those. I’ve also watched them get 40 views a week while a boring, keyword-heavy profile next to it gets 4,000.
Here’s the bit nobody likes admitting: LinkedIn is a search engine before it’s a magazine. Recruiters, buyers and journalists find you by typing terms into the search bar, not by browsing beautiful prose. If your headline says “Passionate about people” instead of “Fractional CFO for £2m to £20m SaaS companies”, you’re invisible to the exact people you want finding you. Charm loses to specificity every single time.
The seven parts of a profile that get looked at
I’ve rebuilt hundreds of client profiles and my own twice, once when I lost most of my old following and had to rebuild in public. In that order of attention, here’s what gets looked at:
- Photo (0.5 seconds of judgement, fair or not)
- Headline (the only bit shown in search results and comments)
- Banner image (wasted white space on 90% of profiles)
- About section, first two lines only (the rest gets a “see more” click maybe 20% of the time)
- Featured section (proof, not opinion)
- Experience, current role first
- Recommendations, quality over quantity
LinkedIn’s own data says profiles with a photo get 21 times more views and 9 times more connection requests than ones without. That single, boring fact does more for your profile than a week spent wordsmithing your About section.
The photo and banner
Your photo needs to be a clear head and shoulders shot, good lighting, no sunglasses, no group crop where someone’s elbow is still in frame. I get asked constantly what size works without LinkedIn squashing it, and the exact LinkedIn profile picture size matters more than people think, because a badly cropped photo makes you look like you don’t know how to use the platform, which is a strange thing to signal if you sell marketing or ops help for a living.
The banner is free real estate that 90% of profiles waste on the default blue pattern. Use it to state your offer in plain text: “I help ecommerce brands cut ad spend by 30% in 90 days” beats a stock photo of a laptop every time.
What a strong headline looks like (real examples)
Weak: “Marketing Professional | Passionate about growth”
Strong: “I help B2B SaaS founders turn LinkedIn into their #1 lead source, no paid ads. Forbes-listed, 300k+ followers built from zero.”
Weak: “Experienced accountant, CPA”
Strong: “Fractional CFO for £2m to £20m ecommerce brands, cash flow and fundraising specialist, ex-Deloitte”
The formula that keeps showing up in every strong headline: who you help, what result you get them, and one credibility marker. Notice none of these are clever. None need a thesaurus. That’s the point, a headline is not the place to be poetic, it’s the place to be searchable.
What a strong About section looks like
Here’s my actual opening, unchanged: “Five years ago I lost the business model that made me a top 100 Forbes influencer. I’ve spent the last two years rebuilding in public, and this is what I’ve learned about doing it without the platforms doing the work for you.”
That’s two sentences and it already tells you who I am, what happened, and what I’m going to give you. Compare that to the version most people write, three paragraphs about their “passion for connecting people” before you find out what they do.
On length, the honest answer is shorter than you think. I’ve covered how long your LinkedIn profile summary should be in detail elsewhere, but the short version is this: write for the first two lines because that’s all most visitors read before deciding whether to click “see more”, and most don’t click.
Featured section: the part strong profiles never skip
This is where opinion turns into proof. A strong Featured section has three things: a case study or result (a screenshot of a client’s actual growth, a before/after, a press mention), a piece of content that shows how you think (a document, a LinkedIn post that did well), and a clear way to contact you or book time.
I pin a one-page PDF with three client results and exact numbers, £48k in new pipeline in 90 days for one client, a 3x increase in inbound leads for another. Numbers beat adjectives. “Results-driven” tells a stranger nothing. “£48k in 90 days” tells them everything.
If you’re using your profile as a sales tool, this is also the place to make it easy to send on. I’ve written about how to share your LinkedIn profile with clients and leads in a way that doesn’t feel like a cold pitch, and a strong Featured section is what makes that link worth clicking through.
Experience section: stop copying your CV
A CV lists duties. A strong LinkedIn experience section lists results, in bullet points, with a number in every one where possible. Compare:
Weak: “Responsible for social media strategy and content calendar”
Strong: “Grew LinkedIn following from 4,000 to 41,000 in 14 months, generating 200+ inbound sales enquiries”
Your current role goes first and gets the most detail. Anything more than eight years old can be trimmed to a single line, nobody is checking your 2011 job title against your headline, but they are checking whether your current role matches what your headline claims.
A real before and after
A client of mine, a fractional CMO I’ll call James (not his real name, he asked me not to use it while he’s still job hunting quietly), came to me with a profile getting around 40 views a week. Headline said “Marketing Leader | CMO | Board Advisor”. Photo was fine. About section was 400 words about his leadership philosophy.
We changed three things. Headline became “Fractional CMO for £5m to £50m consumer brands, I build marketing functions that survive without me”. About section opened with the one result recruiters cared about most, “I’ve built and scaled marketing teams at three companies that were later acquired, most recently growing a team from 2 to 11 before a £40m exit.” Featured section got a one-page case study with numbers.
Six weeks later his profile views were sitting around 600 a week, and he’d had four inbound conversations from companies he hadn’t approached. Nothing about him changed. What changed was that a stranger scanning his profile for five seconds could now answer “is this person relevant to me” without doing any work.
Why your profile might look fine and still be invisible
This is the part most advice skips. A profile can tick every box above, good photo, tight headline, strong About, and still quietly stop getting found. Usually it’s one of two things: the algorithm doesn’t reward profiles that never post or comment, so a static profile fades from search and suggestion feeds even if nothing on it is wrong, and keyword mismatch, where your headline uses a term buyers don’t search for.
If your views have dropped and you can’t work out why, it’s rarely the profile itself, it’s usually activity or wording. I’ve broken down the actual causes in why your LinkedIn profile views keep dropping, and it’s worth checking before you rewrite anything, because sometimes the fix is posting once a week, not editing your About section for the fifth time.
The uncomfortable bit nobody selling “profile optimisation” wants to say out loud
A perfectly written profile with no activity behind it will still underperform a mediocre profile attached to someone who comments and posts weekly. LinkedIn’s search and suggestion algorithms weight recent activity heavily. I’ve seen profiles with a brilliant About section sit at 30 views a week because the person hadn’t posted in eight months, and I’ve seen thin, average profiles pull in hundreds of views a week because the owner comments thoughtfully on ten posts a day in their industry.
So if you’re about to spend four hours perfecting your headline and zero hours posting, you’ve got the ratio backwards. The profile is the shop window. Nobody walks past a shop window that never changes.
A quick checklist to test your own profile right now
- Can a stranger tell what you do and who you help within five seconds of landing on your profile?
- Does your headline contain the actual words someone would search for, not a job title only your old employer used internally?
- Is there a number in your About section, not just an adjective?
- Does your Featured section contain proof, not just a link to your website homepage?
- Have you posted or commented in the last 14 days?
If you can’t say yes to at least four of those, you don’t have a weak profile, you have a stalled one, and stalled is fixable in an afternoon.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a LinkedIn profile look unprofessional?
Usually three things: a badly cropped or low-quality photo, a headline that’s a vague job title instead of a specific offer, and an About section written entirely in the third person like a press release. None of these take long to fix, and fixing the photo and headline alone solves most of it.
How often should I update my LinkedIn profile?
Update your headline and About section whenever your offer, role or focus changes, but review the whole profile every three to six months even if nothing’s changed, since the keywords buyers search for shift over time and your wording should shift with them.
Do I need a banner image on LinkedIn?
You don’t need one, but leaving the default blue pattern wastes visible space that could state your offer in plain text. A banner with one sentence about who you help beats a decorative stock photo almost every time.
Is a long About section better than a short one?
No. Most visitors read the first two lines before deciding whether to click “see more,” and a large share never click at all, so the first two lines need to do the work a long, well-written paragraph three usually never gets read.
