How To Optimize Your

Upwork Profile: Key Steps

and Useful Tips

Your Upwork profile is probably the first (but far from the last) thing that determines your success on the platform. It is the profile that attracts the attention of customers and provides more organic traffic. It also directly affects conversion. Therefore, today's post about optimizing your Upwork profile will be useful for both beginners and experienced freelancers.

1. Profile photo

First, make sure the photo is of good quality, your face is clearly visible, and don't forget to smile. But often, even taking into account all these basic points, your photo will not stand out from similar photos of other freelancers. And our goal is to attract the attention of the client. That’s why, we advise you to use a high-quality photo with a colored background that will attract attention and leave a positive impression.

2. Profile Title

The title should reflect the words that potential customers will use to search for your services. What is needed here is not creativity, but SEO - optimization for a search query, that is, we indicate exactly the title that customers will be looking for. In the case of agencies, optimizing the title can have a positive impact not only on the ranking of the profile on the platform, but also on the Google search page.

3. Profile description

Everyone has probably already written many times about the importance of the correct description of the profile. Therefore, we will add only a few features that can significantly improve the quality of your profile description:

Complete the profile at 100%.
Update your profile regularly. Regularly means 1-2 times a month, not once a year. It is not necessary to rewrite the entire description, you can try to change the title or add something new to the overview.
At the end of the description text, we recommend adding the date of the last update. In this way, we show clients that the profile is up-to-date and the freelancer is active on the platform. In this article, Upwork positively singled out this practice with an example of one of our freelancers.
The Head of Sales of our agency advises to use the AIDA copywriting formula for writing a profile and highlight the key points that the client must pay attention to using Emoji. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. First, we attract the reader’s attention, and then arouse his interest with intriguing information. Next, we make him desire to learn more, and finally we call for action.
Don’t forget about specialized profiles. If you want to specialize in a separate niche, you should not write a main profile for it. It is better to leave the general information in main profile. Then narrow down the specialized profile, because certain characteristics will be available only in it (such as the size of the clients’ companies or their field of activity).

4. Portfolio

The portfolio should, first of all, be visually pleasing and preferably in the case study format. If you already have a portfolio – update old cases and add new skills that were previously unavailable on Upwork. Remove cases from your portfolio that you would no longer like to have and add cases that you would like more of. Read more details on how to write a portfolio here: