By Danielle Mellema, Chief Ghostwriter, Digital Content Manager

If you are a healthcare professional who is eager to grow as a person and leader, get noticed by recruiters, and cultivate connections with colleagues, my guess is you’re already active on LinkedIn.

Perhaps as you scroll your feed you see other leaders in the healthcare field sharing interesting and inspiring content from their personal website, and you wonder to yourself, “Should I have a website with my name on it? Isn’t that a little over-kill if I’m already active on LinkedIn?”

LinkedIn is an excellent resource for people who want to stay ready for the next career opportunity and position themselves as a thought leader. We encourage our executive clients to expand their engagement with it all the time! But there are some benefits that a personal website can offer that a LinkedIn profile—no matter how robust—just can’t. 

Here are some of the ways that pairing a personal website with a strong LinkedIn presence can help you develop your personal brand and clearly communicate what makes you stand out as a leader.

Brand Consistency

LinkedIn is a helpful resource for people looking to grow their network and engage with their audience. And it’s free and easy to use to boot! But because profiles are form-field based, with a pre-set structure, there isn’t much opportunity to give your profile a look and feel that aligns with your unique personal brand.

Not so with a personal website! You can share similar information, but in a flexible format that makes sure every visitor to your website knows what makes you stand out in the healthcare field. You get to decide what goes “above the fold,” so to speak, rather than your current position getting top billing as the LinkedIn template requires.

Visibility

When you do a Google search for your own name, what comes up on the first page of search results? If you have a LinkedIn profile, it will likely appear somewhere near the top.

But consider what you wish your potential employers, future clients, or colleagues could see first when they Google your name. Maybe it’s that news coverage about the impact of your health system’s new facility, the video of you offering words of inspiration to the graduating class at your alma mater, a really thoughtful article you wrote applying your expertise to a recent medical development or organizational challenge. In short, something that does a better job of showing who you are as a leader than your current title or number of connections. 

While all of these things can be shared in some shape or form on LinkedIn, only a personal website has the built-in tools to boost your SEO (that’s search engine optimization) and help shape your digital first impression when someone heads to Google to learn more about you.

Credibility

Creating a LinkedIn profile is fairly simple (though crafting an effective one takes help from a professional) and has little to no cost barrier. When you create a website, on the other hand, you show your audience that you believe in your abilities, potential, and the unique messages you have to share enough to make an investment of both time and money to pursue personal and professional growth.

Personal websites also offer more varied and interactive opportunities—through well-written copy, images, blogs, and videos, to name a few—to show what you have to offer healthcare organizations or clients and position yourself as a leader.

LinkedIn is an incredible tool to find new career opportunities and position yourself as a thought leader. We see this time and again with our clients. But LinkedIn is usually most effective when a leader’s engagement in that platform is rooted in and drives traffic back to a personal website that has spot-on branding and clearly shows in everything from copy to graphics to top-tier content what makes you a stand-out leader.

Curious about how a personal website could boost your personal brand? You don’t have to figure it out alone! Learn more about how we can help right here.