How to Audit Your LinkedIn Profile Like a Buyer Would

How do you audit your LinkedIn profile? You read it the way a potential client reads it, in the first fifteen seconds, and you ask whether they could tell what you do, who you do it for and what to do next.

Most people audit their profile by checking whether every section is filled in. That is useful, but it is not what decides whether a buyer reaches out.

Here is the check I use instead.

Your profile is a shop front

When a buyer hears your name in a meeting, they look you up before they ever pick up the phone. Your profile is the shop window they are looking into.

If they can see straight away what you sell and that it is for someone like them, they walk in. If they cannot, they keep walking, and you never find out they were there.

I call this your shop FRONT, and I check it in five parts.

The five questions I ask of every profile

1/ Foundations: does this person seem to be talking to someone like me? A buyer should feel spoken to the moment they land on your photo, banner and headline, not feel like they have wandered onto a general page for everyone.

2/ Recognition: can I tell what they do, and for whom, in 30 seconds? This is the question most profiles fail. The profile describes a job title, and the buyer is left to guess what problem you actually solve.

3/ Offer: do I know what I would actually buy from them? A buyer who cannot picture the thing they would be paying for will not ask about it.

4/ Next step: do I know what to do next? A good profile makes the next move obvious, whether that is booking a call, reading a Featured item or sending a message.

5/ Trust: do I believe they can deliver for someone like me? Proof that sounds like the buyer’s own situation does far more than a long list of qualifications.

Read your own profile once for each question, and mark each one as clear, partly clear or unclear. Be honest, because you already know your own work, which makes it very hard to see what a stranger sees.

Find your biggest gap first

You do not need to fix all five at once. Whichever question you marked as unclear is costing you the most, so that is where to start.

For most of the business owners and teams I work with, it is the second one. They are excellent at what they do, but the profile does not say who they help in a sentence a buyer can repeat to a colleague.

Take the three-minute version

I built a free tool that runs this check for you. You answer a few questions about who you want to reach, add a screenshot of the top of your profile, and you get a score out of 100, a clear or unclear rating for each of the five parts, and the one gap to fix first. You do not log in to LinkedIn, and it works on your phone.

Start your free 3-minute LinkedIn profile audit.

What to do once you know your gap

A clearer profile is the first stage of REACH, the five-stage system I teach to bring the right buyers to you. It is also the stage most teams skip. If you are responsible for a whole sales, marketing or leadership team, I run keynotes, workshops and ongoing training that start with exactly this check, person by person. You can see how it works on my keynotes and training page.

Looking at your own profile right now, which of the five questions would a buyer find hardest to answer?