LinkedIn Search Tip: Getting Found in LinkedIn Even When People Misspell Your Name

There’s a simple LinkedIn trick that allows other people to easily search for and find your LI user profile, even if they misspell your name in the LinkedIn Search box.

Using the About text on the LinkedIn profile screen, you can use common misspellings of your name as a tool to help others find your LI profile when they’re not sure how to spell your name.

And this trick not only works for misspellings, it also works to have people locate you by your nicknames, pre-marriage name, pre-divorce name, or even a stage name.

Here’s how it works.

The Way LinkedIn Search Works

When you edit your LinkedIn user profile, LinkedIn adds the information from your LI profile name, your profile headline, your About section, and a few other profile fields to its search engine. When people type a search term into LinkedIn that matches something in your headline or About section, your profile will automatically come up in the search results.

LinkedIn adds whatever is in your profile and About text to its search engine. To allow people to find your profile using a common misspelling of your name, simply add that misspelling to your Linked profile About text. (Click on Enlarge)

To enable people to find your LinkedIn profile when they misspell your name, all you have to do is add the most common misspellings of your name to your LI profile summary and LinkedIn will add it to its search engine database. When they search on your misspelled name, LinkedIn will bring up your user profile in the search results.

This technique is similar to when people put SEO keywords in their profile summary to associate their profiles with certain keywords and skills, so they can be located when other LI users are searching for people with those skills. Only this time, you’re associating your profile with common misspelling that people sometimes associate with your name.

Misspelling your name on purpose

To modify your summary text, go into the Edit LinkedIn Profile screen and click on the little pencil edit icon next to the About section.

To make sure that people can still find you when they search on your misspelled name, add a common misspellings list to the bottom of your summary text, like this.

Common misspellings: Joe Hertvick, Joe Hertvig, Joe Hertvic, Joe Hertviz, Joe Hertivik 

Click on Save and whenever people search for you on LinkedIn using either your correctly spelled or incorrectly spelled names, LI search will find you and direct them to your LinkedIn profile in the search results.

This trick also works for full names. If I want people to find me when they type in my full name of Joseph Hertvik, I can add the following line to my summary text.

Full name: Joseph Hertvik

If you want to see what this looks like in my profile About text, click here to look at my LinkedIn profile and expand the About section of my profile.

To see this search tip in action, go to your LinkedIn home page and type Joe Hertvic into the LinkedIn search box and my Joe Hertvik LI profile will show up in the search results.

You can also use this trick to put in a former name if you change the name on your LinkedIn user profile, or if you want to add a nickname to your profile that people can search on.

And that’s all there is to setting up your LinkedIn user profile so other users can find you in LI search, even if your name is misspelled. It’s easy once you know the trick.