5 Reasons To Ignore Your Weekly Search Results

There are features on LinkedIn that can be charitably described as misleading. 

Today, I will show you how your weekly “Search Appearances” is one of them. You get the impression that these people “found” you on LinkedIn and looked at your profile. The reality is very different.

Every week one of these shows up in my notifications: 

You can then click on it and go to learn more about “your searchers.” 

Take it from someone who knows: “You appeared in 149 searches this week” is about as disingenuous a statement as you will ever read. 

Here are five reasons why “Your Weekly Search Stats” are misleading and should be ignored

1) You are not told where you ranked in those search results. 

You are somewhere in all the results that a person got as a result of their search. Say you are a purchasing manager in Illinois and someone searches for purchasing managers in Illinois. They will get around 2500 hundred results, one of which will be you. At ten results a page on (free) LinkedIn, that means there are two hundred and fifty pages of Linked results. You are somewhere in one of those pages. 

LinkedIn doesn’t say whether you were on page 1 – and likely to be seen – or on page 224, where you will never ever be seen. When was the last time you performed a Google search and reviewed all the results?

2) LinkedIn shows you up to five companies where your searchers work. This has absolutely zero value because you don’t know what these people were searching for. Was it the HR department looking for employees? Was it someone researching an industry? A vendor doing research? A salesperson looking for prospects?

3) LinkedIn shows you what your searchers do. Again, with no context what am I to think of this. Six percent of the people whose searches I turned up in last week were “Founders”. Of what? IBM? Fred’s Flower Shop?

4) And lastly, LinkedIn will occasionally – I had none this week – tell you what keywords they used to search. In my case, last week they were VP Marketing, Coach and Consultant. 

5) And this is the biggest one, which ties all the others together:

Most LinkedIn users have no clue how to search effectively. 

They put titles in the search box instead of searching by title. They search too broadly by geography. And they get too many results, most of them garbage results. Those are the searches you showed up in. 

Let me summarize with an example: I just stopped writing for a moment (it’s Sunday morning August 25th as I write this), hopped on LinkedIn and did a search for people in North America. So congratulations, if you are a LinkedIn member and live in North America, you just showed up in my search results….with over 100 million other people. But my search will be one of the ones you showed up in this week. 

LinkedIn wants you to think that showing up in search results is a big deal. It’s not. It only is if three criteria  are met: 

• The person searching is actually searching for someone like you
• The person searching knows what they are doing
• You show up really high in the search results, like in the first couple pages

LinkedIn has a lot of features like Your Weekly Search Appearances. They seem really useful, they typically appeal to our vanity, and they are pretty useless. Understanding the way all these doodads work on LinkedIn will take you a long way to using your time on LinkedIn more effectively.