Do not index
Do not index
Agency founders keep asking me: "What's the best LinkedIn headline formula to attract clients?" The question itself reveals why their profiles generate the wrong conversations. The best LinkedIn headline for an agency founder doesn't attract—it filters. Your headline should make bad-fit prospects scroll past while making ideal clients stop and think "this person gets exactly what I need." Most agency owners write headlines designed to maximize profile views, which guarantees you'll spend half your week on discovery calls with people you'll never close.
The headline that converts isn't the one that appeals to everyone. It's the one that makes specific people feel seen while making everyone else feel excluded. When your headline tries to serve multiple audiences, it serves none of them well. You end up attracting startups who can't afford you, enterprise prospects who need something you don't offer, and solopreneurs who want done-for-you services when you only do advisory. Every conversation becomes a qualification exercise instead of a depth conversation about implementation.
This approach works for agency founders running businesses between four hundred thousand and two million in revenue who get most of their business through referrals and reputation. You're not trying to be discovered by strangers searching LinkedIn for "marketing agency" or "growth consultant." You're trying to make the right impression when someone in your network says "you should talk to this person" and your prospect pulls up your profile before the intro call. Your headline needs to confirm positioning, not explain what you do. If you're still building your first hundred thousand in revenue or you rely on outbound prospecting to fill your pipeline, this approach will starve your lead flow. You need volume at that stage, not selectivity.
This is also not for founders who offer multiple service lines to multiple industries. If you do brand strategy for SaaS companies and also run paid ads for e-commerce brands, you can't write a filtering headline without excluding half your potential business. You're still in the generalist phase, which requires different positioning entirely. The filtering approach only works when you've already narrowed your offering enough that turning away bad fits doesn't threaten your revenue.
The Positioning Filter Framework works in three parts: audience specificity, problem specificity, and explicit exclusion. Most agency founders get the first part halfway right—they mention an audience. "I help B2B companies" or "I work with tech startups." But audience specificity without problem specificity just tells people what industry you're in, not what transformation you deliver. Problem specificity means naming the exact situation your ideal client faces, not the generic outcome they want. "Scaling content production" is generic. "Turning founder-dependent content into a system that runs without you" is specific. It names the pain point that only a certain type of founder experiences at a certain stage of growth.
The third part—explicit exclusion—is what most founders skip entirely because it feels counterintuitive. You're afraid that saying "not for startups under five hundred thousand in revenue" will cost you opportunities. It does cost you opportunities. That's the point. The opportunities it costs you are the ones that would have wasted three weeks of your calendar before you realized they couldn't afford your retainer or didn't have the infrastructure to implement what you recommend. Exclusion in your headline does the qualification work before the conversation starts. When someone reads your headline and thinks "that's not me," they've just saved you both time. When they read it and think "that's exactly me," they arrive at the conversation already convinced you understand their situation.
The mistake most agency founders make is treating their headline as a marketing message instead of a positioning signal. Marketing messages try to persuade. Positioning signals try to sort. When you write "I help companies grow revenue through strategic content" you're making a marketing claim that could apply to thousands of agencies. When you write "I help seven-figure service businesses turn their founder's expertise into content systems that close deals without sales calls" you're making a positioning statement that only applies to a narrow band of companies at a specific stage with a specific problem. The first headline gets more profile views. The second headline gets better conversations.
Your headline should sound like the opening sentence of a sales call with your best client. Not the call where you're still figuring out if they're a fit—the call where they've already been referred, they've read your content, and they're asking "how do we start?" That's the tone you're aiming for. Confident specificity about who you serve and what you solve, with no hedging about "various industries" or "multiple solutions." The founders who need what you offer will recognize themselves immediately. Everyone else will keep scrolling, which is exactly what you want.
This connects directly to how agency founders should think about voice consistency across their entire profile. Your LinkedIn profile should sound like your sales calls—the same language, the same specificity, the same exclusions. When there's a gap between how you position yourself in writing and how you talk to qualified prospects, you create friction at every touchpoint. The headline is just the first filter in a series of filters that should all reinforce the same positioning.
The strategic implication here extends beyond your headline into how you think about your entire client acquisition system. If your headline filters correctly but your content strategy tries to appeal to everyone, you've just created positioning confusion. If your headline is specific but your About section goes broad to "not limit opportunities," you're undermining the filter you just built. Positioning is a system, not a component. Your headline sets the expectation, but every other element of your profile needs to reinforce that same filter. The agency founders who grow through referrals and reputation instead of outbound volume understand this instinctively. They're not trying to be discovered by everyone. They're trying to be the obvious choice for someone specific. Your headline is where that clarity starts, but it's your consistency across every touchpoint that makes it credible.
