Recently on the Unscripted SEO Podcast, I sat down with Daniel Alfon, a LinkedIn expert who’s been mastering the platform since 2004—back when social media wasn’t even a thing. What started as a conversation about LinkedIn optimization turned into a deep dive on entity SEO, B2B psychology, and why most people completely misunderstand LinkedIn’s true power.
Daniel shared insights that challenge everything we think we know about LinkedIn success, including his core philosophy: “Write for the human eye using the words that algorithms use.” Here’s what every SEO should know about treating LinkedIn as the search engine it actually is.
Introduction
Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted Podcast host, here with Daniel Alfon. He’s going to introduce himself and tell us why he’s an expert.
Daniel Alfon: Thank you very much, Jeremy, for having me on the UnscriptedSEO podcast. I made all the possible mistakes in the book as I signed up for a platform called LinkedIn back in 2004.
Social wasn’t even a thing. And gradually, I discovered a very powerful platform where SEO is even hidden — like billions of searches are performed on the platform every year, but most people don’t think about LinkedIn as a repository or as a keyword-sensitive platform.
The Psychology of Social Media Evolution
Jeremy Rivera: That’s true. Most people just kind of treat it as the place they put their resume for the four years they don’t need it until they’re changing jobs and then they rush to make five changes. When did I start at that cookie company? I don’t know… this date maybe and then occasionally you check out the TED talk videos that they might want to watch, right?
Daniel Alfon: This is the exact definition of what 90% of people would do. Not necessarily the best thing to do, but yes, that happens a lot. You’re absolutely right, Jeremy.
Jeremy Rivera: So there’s this fascinating thing I want to dive into — the psyche aspect and element of people, the transition from 1995 to 2000, maybe even 2005, where you went on the internet, you found a website, you went to other websites, you did things, you posted blogs, you read blogs, you maybe participated in forums.
But there was this mind shift of suddenly — you know what, we’re going to call one particular website that you go in and interact on. It’s not a website anymore, it’s social media.
And we stripped away all of the conventions of traditional digital marketing that we understood and just said, “It’s just social media. We post stuff there and it’s got its… we’ll hire somebody differently who is a social media expert to post,” and there was a kind of stepping away of any other sort of marketing other than it’s social media.
So, do you agree with that strange evolution in how we treat these particular sites?
Authenticity vs. Professional Personas
Daniel Alfon: Yes, I would. I went back and listened to the first episode you hosted with Mark, the previous host. And I think one of you mentioned the fact that you have a real life business and a real life personality. And if there’s a gap or a mismatch between what people think about you and your brand and what the website shows, then you can’t be successful.
And truth is, our listeners have a real life personality and they don’t need to hide it or become someone else to be successful on LinkedIn.
Jeremy Rivera: I think that’s an interesting point because it often comes across in my interviews — at the end I ask, “Hey, where can they find you? Where do you hang out?” And a lot of SEO professionals or people I interview say “I’m on LinkedIn because it’s the most professional.”
And I think that that might be because it’s the closest association of identity with what you’re putting out there. And there’s an association of your experience and a connection to your job that isn’t inherent in, say, Twitter. I mean, I have a couple of handles that I’m not going to dox myself on that aren’t connected to my name at all.
I have a handle that’s for the unscripted podcast. I’ve got a handle for SEO Arcade, which is my software SaaS, and then Jeremy Rivera SEO. But there are other Reddit profiles that are completely anonymized.
So I think there is something there to be said of the heavy connection and the reliance of this particular platform to produce authority by connecting the person more heavily to their history, their job history.
LinkedIn’s SEO Power and Authority Building
Daniel Alfon: What’s fascinating — I’ll mention two quick things. You mentioned authority. For most of us, we run a Google search for our own full name, many people will find that their LinkedIn profile tops the list.
Without paid advertising, with organic — pure organic — LinkedIn is on top of the list, sometimes number one, and even people who wrote books. You published a book, still the LinkedIn profile would be important enough to manage it and not let LinkedIn manage it for you.
Jeremy Rivera: I think that’s an important thing to note and it ties into some of the conversations I’ve had with SEO folk who are focused on Google’s dissection and understanding of entities — people as entities — and connecting your own personal knowledge graph of who it is that you are and what you do.
It’s not as simple as “I published a previous book.” I self-published this SEO book and all I got was this lousy knowledge panel in Google. The funny thing was that six months in, I hadn’t actually gotten the knowledge panel. I had to take, explore and take some additional actions of getting into a Wikipedia entry for authors and a couple other places before Google would even surface my Amazon profile for my book, much less give me a full author panel.
But all the time, if you searched Jeremy Rivera SEO, you would find among the first page, my LinkedIn entry for sure, as well as my other websites and such.
But I think you’re hitting on something valuable here of entity and identity and leveraging this platform. So tell me a little bit more about some of the processes that you use, that you consult, that you tell people to consider when it comes to leveraging LinkedIn to connect to your entity and connect to your authority.
Strategic Positioning: What Do You Want to Be Known For?
Daniel Alfon: So the initial question we would ask is: What would we like to be known for?
If you’d like to be known for local SEO, then you try to step into the mind of someone who needs SEO for their local business. Can I give an example? Sure. So let me discuss the Nashville Billiard and Patio, a client of yours. You know them.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, by all means. I know them!
Daniel Alfon: What you could do promoting the Nashville Billiard and Patio is instead of saying we have this — cater into the LinkedIn community, which is business oriented. So you would offer companies instead of thinking about the customer.
You will think about the CEO or the VP of Marketing — they want to learn something, they have an annual meeting, they have a sales meeting, and they could come to the patio. And you would offer them a whole new service.
So instead of promoting the patio for individuals, you would cater to companies. You would add photos of executives dining there, having fun, and you would brand it as a corporate entity.
Even if it’s 5% of your business, this could be much more valuable than 95% of your business because corporates are less price sensitive. They could bring dozens of people to the patio. And if they’re happy, they would recommend it to other people and to other companies.
Understanding B2B: The Bureaucracy Factor
Jeremy Rivera: That’s an interesting plan and an interesting thought about who you are expecting to interact with you or your brand or your business. It’s the simplicity of saying, “Oh, I’m a B2B. I do business to business.” But really…
When I’m setting up so many of my audits or processes, I try to ask multiple questions to understand who is the person that has the credit card that’s being swiped or who is approving the finance person for that purchase. If it’s B2B, then there is… the B stands for bureaucracy.
Daniel Alfon: That’s tough.
Jeremy Rivera: So you need to know who has the stamp.
You know, I just rewatched the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the movie, and they’re like, “You can’t release the prisoner. You need a presidential release form. Those are blue.” They’re racing to save her life, and they have to fill out the right paperwork and check it out and bring it to this alien Vogon for processing.
And it’s like, you have to remember that the B in B2B is bureaucracy and you are not dealing with an impulse buy, you’re dealing with multiple layers, approvals, potentially meetings, discussing… It’s ridiculous, but you know, a $15 subscription could be a multi-meeting line item that needs to get checked off. It’s not like being in the convenience store where I would like some gum and I will make this impulse purchase.
Finding Your B2B Angle
Daniel Alfon: You’re absolutely correct, and if you mention B2B in the bureaucracy or business aspect of it, then you could think, Jeremy, of many, many businesses that consider themselves to be B2C, but could have a small B2B aspect. Can I give another example?
Jeremy Rivera: By all means, I love case studies and examples.
Daniel Alfon: Great. So the easiest thing to do — you know a lot about real estate. I’m a realtor and most people will think about the LinkedIn platform as the place to go and say, “Hi, I have this condo, I have this apartment.”
But what you have to take into account is the fact that business owners are living on LinkedIn. So what you could do — 90% of your time you would sell condos in Nashville, Tennessee, but what you would show on LinkedIn is office space to managers who want to relocate their business into downtown Nashville or anything like that.
So this could represent, again, only 5% of your business, but that could be a lot more valuable than selling 20 properties in three months. So you probably have a B2B aspect of your business. That’s what you need to stress on LinkedIn.
Understanding Your Audience
Jeremy Rivera: I agree. I did an interview with a realtor, Carrie McGee, and she talked about the personality type. So when she’s posting content, she keeps in mind that you’ll often have an A-type personality with a C-type personality.
One person’s like, “Okay, what are the specs? How old is the AC? When was the last time on the maintenance?” And the other is like, “Can we barbecue on this back patio?”
They’re like totally different personality types. And so the information you want to display, you want to be able to promote that material — promote or have material that speaks to your audience.
And so in a business scenario for a commercial realtor, you’re very much more likely… in a B2B situation, you have a lot more detail oriented people and you have a much higher need, higher functioning process of minutiae and detail and much less vibe.
And they need it, again, linking us back to B2B is bureaucracy. But it’s also speaking to your audience and understanding. A part of that, I agree, is if you’re using a platform like LinkedIn, it’s smart to understand who is there and why they’re there to make the most of the opportunity.
LinkedIn’s Growth and Search Visibility
Daniel Alfon: You’re absolutely right. And since we started this very chat on the unscripted SEO, thousands of people, Jeremy, have joined LinkedIn. According to LinkedIn stats, every second three people sign up.
Jeremy Rivera: Okay, I mean that is a convincing argument for paying more attention, especially as we feel the squeeze. We feel the squeezes — AI overviews eat more and more of the SERPs. But also note that LinkedIn data does appear available and consumable and presented within LLM results.
Daniel Alfon: One of the benefits of LinkedIn is that if you decide to pivot your business and you update your page or your profile within 20 seconds, that’s what the world will see.
And there’s no log — no one sees what happened before that. People will run a search and go to SEO Arcade or go to Jeremy Rivera SEO. And just a quick tip, if you visit — I encourage listeners to check out your online profile, which could be in the show notes. And the handle is Jeremy Rivera SEO. 20 seconds of work, a work of genius. Do it.
LinkedIn SEO: Writing for Humans Using Algorithm Words
Jeremy Rivera: I love it and it’s also like it magnifies out too because there’s so many extra steps of rebranding that we put ourselves through and all of the migrations, but you’re right. The entity update for LinkedIn is transitory. There isn’t a backlog and Google does pull LinkedIn snippets right away.
I know also, I think ChatGPT, you can query data and access information through their GPT search and find LinkedIn as well. So there’s secondary — thinking beyond just the Google SERP and thinking about other search engines, LinkedIn, I’d love to get your insights on what are the ways that you can influence whether or not you show up when people type in a particular industry search or try to find a business or service in LinkedIn, treating it as a search engine.
What is it about profiles? What is it about posts? What is it about recommendations? What are the things that cause or influence — we’ll call it your LinkedIn indexation or legalization? LinkedIn ranking, what do you, if you had to rate those, what are the factors that you consider?
Daniel Alfon: Excellent. So the thing to remember is to write for the human eye using the words that algorithms use.
In other words, let’s take an example of a solopreneur or someone who was a consultant… Let’s say like an Atlanta law office.
The Atlanta attorney would probably use words that are very specific, technical and legalese. However, you need to remember the words that your prospects will use and they could enter words that are either way more general or even plain wrong.
They would run a search for “inheritance.” Or they would run a search for “divorce” or they would run a search for something that the attorney themselves — they would not think about those terms because they know a lot more about their business.
So interviewing prospects or interviewing clients coming in could help you understand the search they’re using. And then there should be a smart way for you to weave those terms in a natural way into your profile.
And I’m saying profile because the 90% of what we should focus on is our individual profile and not our page.
Focus on Individual Profiles Over Company Pages
Jeremy Rivera: Okay.
Daniel Alfon: LinkedIn is a different beast and unless the law firm employs thousands of people, then most lead generation will come through their individual profile.
So look at that profile, ask yourself three simple questions:
- Who’s my ideal reader?
- What action would I like them to perform once they discover me?
- Am I making it as easy and smooth as possible for them to understand what the next step is?
The Power of Recommendations
Jeremy Rivera: That makes sense. So it’s about profile completion. Is there an impact of some of the bells and whistles that LinkedIn has added over the years, like getting recommendations? Is that something that provides additional weight, provides additional authority transfer from those other profiles that can impact your ability to be seen?
Daniel Alfon: That’s an excellent question. It does make a difference for the human reader much more than the algorithm.
Going back to the Atlanta, Georgia attorney, if I visit two profiles and one of them would have a strong or a high recommendation to connection ratio — they have 400 connections and I see 10 recommendations and I read them — it would carry more weight than someone with 2000 connections with one recommendation that’s lukewarm or dull or plain vanilla.
So it wouldn’t change the algorithm necessarily, but as a reader, you tend to give more — you trust more individuals or attorneys that other people have recommended. And you would note commonalities: they mentioned the fact that they’re business-like, they’re direct, they’re serviceable.
This can help you either say, “This is the right attorney for me,” or to say, “I’m going to disqualify myself, I’m looking for someone else.” So recommendations are important.
And one of the recommendations I would suggest is to ask for recommendations every time you pivot. You mentioned people running to LinkedIn every three or four years. That’s the time to ask for the recommendations because it’s easier for your coworkers and managers and employees and subcontractors to write that recommendation for you today and not harass them in two years time.
Content Strategy: Articles vs. Posts
Jeremy Rivera: That totally makes sense. I’m curious about education credentials — say you’re running a rehab in New Jersey, you’re as a business. So you’re saying don’t use a page, you’re going to want your individual top therapists to be the ones that are posting on LinkedIn, and they’ve got multiple designations that they’ve gotten from the state for their accreditation. So you want to make sure that those education pieces are put in there and updated.
You have the general recommendations. What is the importance or non-importance of tools like LinkedIn Pulse where you can post full articles as opposed to just a usual LinkedIn post, posting video, and I know that they also have — I was invited to participate and answer questions in collaborative articles. So does participation in collaborative articles, does posting articles on LinkedIn Pulse, what are the influences of that on your access visibility, accessibility in the algorithm or in general?
Daniel Alfon: That’s such an amazing question. I’d like to stress the difference between what LinkedIn calls a LinkedIn article and a LinkedIn post.
What we see usually or often is posts: “I visited that conference and here are my five takeaways.” Articles would be great for thought leadership. And the amount of time you need to invest in order to write a well-written article is sometimes a lot more — it will take you a lot more time to draft the article and to publish it.
So the easiest question to ask is: What is the shelf life of that content?
If the shelf life is long, if you’re analyzing trends, and this is going to be important in six months time, then maybe a LinkedIn article is best for you. If you’re saying that tomorrow you have a time sensitive event… I was listening to another episode, a recent one with Marisa Kelly, and you discussed the importance of events. So if I have a real life event tomorrow, I will not use the platform of the LinkedIn article because it would be dated by the time the event is gone.
However, if you analyze trends, if you’re speaking about something that’s general, and if the content can be a good read in six months’ time or 12 months’ time, then a LinkedIn article gives you more weight. And it’s something that in terms of SEO, even people with no LinkedIn account can still read the article because the moment you hit publish, there is a URL that people can access without even having access to LinkedIn.
Ask yourself what sort of content has long shelf life and use that for articles.
The UGC Advantage and Content Distribution
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, I would note Lily Ray and other SEOs have demonstrated that sometimes taking the same article that isn’t performing on your own site and posting it as a LinkedIn pulse has actually given them the chance to show up because of Google’s favoritism for UGC platforms like Reddit, like LinkedIn, surfacing pulse articles, Medium, Substack — they’re seen in a different way.
It’s a different content type. So even if it’s the exact same article… I take a slightly different strategy for my own recaps. I take the interview, I have a version I give to the guest, I have a version that goes on my own site that goes out on the show notes and then a version for my domain, but I also make a LinkedIn pulse article as well that does contain the same links and references for it as well.
And I have been able to… I think our previous generation called it barnacle SEO, where you’re not recreating the ship, but you’re sticking something on extra. But it really is more, I think the bigger now is about owned content distribution and the name of the game is less in terms of “how do I get the most visibility on Google for my site” versus “how do I get the most visibility on Google or search engines of all kinds period.”
So thinking about the potentials of how do I better display my entity — well LinkedIn is a great way to boost your entity, but also these LinkedIn pulse posts associated with my identity and entity are topically relevant. And the UGC aspect, user generated content aspect, gives it a separate entry into the same query space that might give you an advantage.
A little bit of a boost or even grabbing more space on the same query. If you’re able to show up twice as opposed to just once, then you push back on your competitors because then you have more owned space in that SERP by creating a different data entry point in the knowledge graph for that topic.
Converting LinkedIn Traffic to Your Own Domain
Daniel Alfon: It’s interesting, and if you’re discussing boost, you mentioned the fact that many guests point to their LinkedIn profile and that it conveys the kind of authority we want to associate ourselves with. However, Jeremy, conversion happens better on our own domain, on our own website.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah.
Daniel Alfon: So the call to action should not be “check me on LinkedIn,” but “go to my website.” Because if I go to your website, then you own the system. If I contact you through the website, you’d get a lot more information from me.
Just like the book you published — when I buy the book, the entity that holds the information is Amazon or Barnes & Noble and not yourself as the author. So we want to move people from the LinkedIn arena to our website.
LinkedIn is important. It’s an important source, but don’t be confused. The metrics should be your real-life business metrics and not the LinkedIn metrics.
Jeremy Rivera: Absolutely. I think that that has been true, will remain true no matter how Google messes around with the SERPs. It’s about ownership of your audience and thinking even on your site.
Just because somebody visits — yes, you could set up retargeting that then you have to pay for a second bite at the apple. But if you’re not taking the time to properly set up your calls to action off of that, then you’re not doing your job properly. So thinking about those conversion aspects off of your site is the next step down the funnel.
Top, mid, bottom funnel all feeds in.
The Most Surprising LinkedIn Behavior
Jeremy Rivera: In engagement where you’re consulting or doing things for people on LinkedIn, what’s the most surprising thing that people find out about LinkedIn that they either act really surprised about or always seems to catch them off guard that we haven’t covered yet?
Daniel Alfon: Let me try one thing. In every workshop, I ask half a dozen questions. And by the middle of the workshop, people know that the first answer is not the right answer. But I’ll give just one example.
What is the action that LinkedIn users perform the most on the LinkedIn platform after logging in? Like there are over 1 billion users. And according to LinkedIn statistics, there is one action that most people perform the most on LinkedIn. Try to guess.
Jeremy Rivera: They click like.
Daniel Alfon: That’s a good answer to a different question. No.
Jeremy Rivera: Alright, what you got?
Daniel Alfon: So the single most important and frequent action is visiting other people’s profiles.
And if you think of it, that’s one reason why profiles are so important. And LinkedIn is the only platform where, Jeremy, you can be successful without posting content. That’s amazing.
Because if you want to be successful on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok, you have to upload content. But what interests your reader is, first of all — getting back to Atlanta, Georgia law office — is your specialty the specialty I’m looking for? And not “have you posted about last week’s whatever.”
If you are the right answer for me, then I may look at your posts, but it’s not as important as what you bring to the table. So take care of your profiles. And this is way, way more important than posting and start with making sure your profile converts.
Profile Conversion Strategy
Jeremy Rivera: So let’s talk about profile conversion from an aspect. Are you looking for people to reach out and follow and connect you and start a DM conversation? Or is it more about getting them off of your profile to your site, so making sure that you have listed appropriately in your profile an offsite destination for them to click through to where you can capture their information?
Daniel Alfon: I think you know the answer — the second scenario is much better. It’s tempting to stay in the first scenario like “DM me, message or add me or send me connection request.” But what’s more important is what happens in our domain, in our website.
So you have to give them enough information to want to discover your website or your domain. So by visiting your profile, I can see the unscripted SEO, I can see in the contact info the Jeremy Rivera SEO domain. And when I found the content to be interesting, then I would jump off LinkedIn and move to your website.
Another quick suggestion would be to feature — to think about the single most important link you’d like people to go to. Which link would that be if you had to pick one, Jeremy?
Jeremy Rivera: I’m not sure. What do you think?
Daniel Alfon: No, it’s your call. Who’s your ideal reader?
Jeremy Rivera: For me, it’s definitely… I want to reach other SEOs. Because I do best with collaborations, doing partnerships, subcontracting. So for me, connecting with — I want to talk to agency owners. That’s my audience. My ideal audience is other SEO savvy digital marketing agency owners who might want to white label what I’m doing at SEO arcade.com now or might want to get my take on a complex SEO issue.
But for the most part it’s more along those lines of trying to… It’s definitely B2B and it’s definitely talking to SEO agency owners.
Featured Links Strategy
Daniel Alfon: So, let’s take for the sake of this conversation, let’s take SEO Arcade.com and then the white label podcast service. If that’s a decent example, so we could highlight that in your LinkedIn profile in less than a minute.
You basically go to your profile, you click on “add profile section,” recommended “featured link,” and you paste the link. And that would show the link if you’d like above the fold. So it will be a strong, stunning visual on the left. And then text you can control on the right.
And that could increase the traffic to the white label podcast service or whatever link you’d like to use. And Jeremy, if in six months time you’d like to offer something else, it would take you 20 seconds to highlight link building services or your blog or any idea you can think of. Feature your strongest link.
Jeremy Rivera: Got it. Okay, so let me see. So I’m on my LinkedIn profile. Was that the add profile section you said?
Daniel Alfon: Yes, please. Exactly. Add profile section. And now you select recommended, and the first one should be “Add Featured” and you would see a plus sign on the top right which shows you four or five possibilities. “Add a link” is the one to choose and all you have to do now is paste the link, click Add and customize the text or the picture if you’d like.
I’m going to visit your profile before this episode drops to make sure that you featured it.
Jeremy Rivera: Yep, yeah, I’m gonna do that. That’s smart. Okay, got it. I did not know that that was a thing. That’s super helpful.
Wrapping Up
Jeremy Rivera: I know it’s kind of ubiquitous. There’s so many SEOs that use LinkedIn and I prefer it. But I think a lot of SEOs just kind of take the platform for granted and don’t really think about optimization for it. So I definitely appreciate the fresh take on it.
Tell me a little bit, is there any classes you’re doing? Where can people see what you’re talking about? What’s the name of your domain? If they want to engage for their own LinkedIn expert assistance, where can they find more information?
Daniel Alfon: With pleasure, danielalfon.com is the place to go.
Jeremy Rivera: Awesome. Thanks so much for your time, Daniel. I really appreciate the conversation.
Daniel Alfon: Thank you very much for the unscripted conversation, Jeremy.
Key Takeaways
Daniel’s insights completely reframe how SEOs should think about LinkedIn. It’s not just a networking platform—it’s a search engine where your ideal clients are actively researching solutions. The professionals who understand this distinction and optimize accordingly gain a significant competitive advantage.
The core strategy: Treat your LinkedIn profile like a conversion-focused landing page, use the language your prospects actually search for, and always drive traffic back to your own domain where you control the experience.
Want to dive deeper into Daniel’s LinkedIn strategies? Check out his complete resource library or listen to our full podcast conversation for even more actionable insights.
