In an era where digital presence drives business, maintaining your online profile is critical to guiding clients in your direction. Having already created a profile with us, moving forward, all you’ll need to do is revisit your profile and keep it up-to-date with your thought leadership. We’ll then be equipped to reach out to you more frequently with project offers.
With that, the following are some tips and tricks to knowing when and how to easily update your profile.
Managing your digital presence is critical to driving new business leads.
The more often you update your bio, the more often we call with projects.
Did you recently give an area-specific seminar? Testify on a fascinating case? Develop a whole new field of thought leadership? Including compelling updates like these in your bio lets clients know that you can provide expertise on said topics.
To start, your clients want to know about your expertise. They care about how your career history has expanded and enriched. Simply put, thorough expert profiles yield more expert work, which means the descriptions in your bio will keep you competitive in terms of firsthand client review. Fortunately, we make it easy for you to revisit your expert profile anytime and furnish updates regarding your career history and expertise.
Additionally, search engines like Google can “see” and use your changes to determine which websites are active, interesting and alive. Stale content “builds up dust” in Google’s system and ranks your expert profile lower. Updating your profile periodically ensures clients see you when they run a search across the Internet for your specific expertise.
Focus on the important stuff.
When we call you to say we have an engagement on the table, what topic are you hoping we describe? That’s your “sweet spot.”
Think critically about your “sweet spot” as you update your expert profile. Make sure that field is the subject of focus throughout your bio. We encourage you to list your relevant experience in new and innovative areas too, especially if you’re aware of industry growth there.
Don’t go overboard, though. Zero in on your thought leadership, not just any area where you have limited or vague experience. Consider relevant information for clients who may want to connect with you specifically for paid work.
To that point, we recommend focusing on these specific fields:
- Core Expertise Areas (the drop-down menu near the very top of your profile) that highlight your specific thought leadership and walk through each sub-area.
- Consulting and litigation examples, especially if recent or targeted in subject matter.
- Certifications, registrations, and licenses, which attorneys frequently seek and use to identify or exclude candidates for an engagement.
Imagine how your clients might search for you.
When you focus on your thought leadership, consider how other people think about it. How might a client describe your expertise? What words would they search? Weave that terminology and phrasing into your profile so, when a real-life client Googles your area of expertise, your profile is yielded near the top.
To that end, use variation to describe your thought leadership. The search engine specialists on our team call this methodology semantic difference. This practice helps Google rank your profile higher. Your variations should reflect how people speak in real life, which is how we tend to search, too. This type of phrasing makes your profile much more relevant in Google’s and your clients’ eyes, while establishing credibility for your bio. Put another way, your bio should be written so users can easily understand it.
A helpful exercise: Imagine what you would search for in order to find your expertise. Put yourself in a client’s shoes, then try searching for those topics online and on our website. Whose expert profiles appear? What do comparable expert profiles have that your profile doesn’t? Make sure those keywords and phrases are integrated into your bio with us.
Use rich language to optimize client visits to your expert profile.
When describing your thought leadership, avoid broad language. Specifiers and “extenders” (additional keywords) help rank your profile more highly on Google searches. For instance, a description of “hydraulic petroleum engineering” makes your bio much stronger than would “petroleum engineering,” which in turn does significantly better than simply, “engineering.”
The world has thousands of engineering experts, so keeping your expertise simple and broad puts you in competition with far more fellow thought leaders. Such competition greatly decreases the likelihood of a client’s request for you. Plus, honing in on focused aspects of your expertise better reflects how clients actually search.
Search engine optimization is a simple but elegant dance.
While you need to be thorough, and you’ll want to iterate your areas of expertise many times, you never want to use the same term twice in a sentence. Google identifies keyword overuse (“stuffing”) as robotic and can punish your profile ranking if vocab saturation comes on too strong. To keep things organic, talk around the topic (which you already do for a living!). Throughout your profile, use adjacent descriptive terms to weave broad and specific keywords surrounding your expertise area.
Pay attention to headings and subheadings, too. Your tagline (“Expert in…”) plays a crucial role in driving clients to your page, so you’ll want to make sure your specific areas of thought leadership are listed there. If you provide expert witness services, tag “Witness,” or “Expert Witness,” onto your expertise terminology in your tagline and profile text. Think of distinctions like “witness” as a little bonus for clients.
Keep your contact information up-to-date.
It may seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget. We can’t call you with projects if we don’t have your phone number on hand, and we can’t email you client requests if we don’t have your active email address. And, of course, we can’t mail you remuneration for project work if your address isn’t up to date. Each time you update your phone number, email address, work or home address, make sure to revisit your Expert by Big Village profile and change it.
Let’s bring those clients in!
We hope these tips better equip you to take on new and ongoing expert engagements. Stay on the lookout for more expert tips in next quarter’s newsletter!
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