Most businesses understand SEO. What most businesses don't understand, however, is recruitment SEO. Recruitment SEO is easily a source of confusion. Marketers raise a lot of questions as to the effectiveness of this practice. Does recruitment SEO really work? And is it even effective against the hotshot job boards like CareerBuilder, Monster and Simply Hired? Yes. As a matter of fact, recruitment and corporate career websites have all the advantage, now that Google has rolled out its Panda updates.
But, first, let us define recruitment SEO. Recruitment SEO is the process of improving the visibility or your recruitment or jobs content website in Google's organic searches. When done properly, it will send suitable job applicants directly from Google to your website. Once an effective SEO strategy is in place, recruitment SEO continuously sends applicants to your site while cutting down on costs that would have otherwise been spent on advertising, screening, training new hires and other recruitment costs.
Why Recruitment SEO?
More than 70% of Internet users rely on Google and other search engines to look for jobs. That is according to the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey in U.K. What's more, TMP Worldwide estimates that around 13 to 15 million jobseekers turn to Google every month and, according to Google U.K., over 50% of job searches are based on a job title or an industry and location. SEO provides a colossal market of jobseekers. More importantly, it eliminates the thankless job of weeding through unsuitable CVs since applicants who found your website through Google are more likely to have actively searched for your jobs in your industry and location. Recruitment SEO, therefore, expedites the hiring process and reduces the costs.
Moreover, recruitment websites hold an advantage over job aggregator sites in the form of original content. The Panda and Penguin algorithms were so designed so that Google now evaluates websites through a machine-duplicated human perspective. With Panda in place, the syndicated content in most job boards is likely to get slapped. On the other hand, each new job vacancy posted on your website is original content. Google loves that.
However, it isn't enough to rely on posting open positions to get ahead of the search results. Recruitment SEO is a combination of a number of on-site and off-site strategies to maximize your chances of getting found on Google.
On-site Recruitment SEO
Before Panda, Google ranked individual pages, not entire websites. Post-Panda changes have caused dips in a website's rankings just because of a single page that was not optimized well. You have full control over whatever happens on all your pages. The key SEO factors to remember are keywords and content.
1. Keywords. Pre-Panda marketers were used to placing the right number of keywords in a page. After Panda, keyword density is no longer as important as choosing the right keywords and putting them in all the right places. Google's keyword tool can help you identify the right keywords according to the number of monthly searches and level of competition. In placing keywords, focus on the following areas:
a. Page Title - Google's web crawlers scan web pages from top to bottom and will encounter your page title first. Place your most important keyword in the page title and try to keep it short, since Google places less value in keywords the longer they go.
b. Body Text - Use the same keywords in the page title and avoid keyword stuffing. Google punishes websites that litter their texts generously with keywords.
c. Meta Tags - Write a short description for your website and include your main keywords.
d. Alt Text - Images also need keywords to be optimized for Google's Image Search.
e. Internal Links - Linking to internal pages indicates a website with comprehensive and quality content. When linking to other pages, use keywords targeted for the other page in your anchor text.
2. Content. Fresh, timely and original content is what Google is looking for. Allocate each job to its own web page and create in-depth job profiles that are unique to your website. Find other ways to provide good content. A recruitment blog is one. Not only does it get updated more often, a blog also encourages applicants to come back to your website and share your content. And don't limit your blog to text content. Interactive videos, audios and images get you plus points from Google.
Off-Site Recruitment SEO
Much less control is given to a website owner when it comes to off-site SEO, but it doesn't mean there is no room for maneuvering. Optimizing from outside of your website has one single purpose: to establish the authority of your website.
1. Quality Inbound Links - Your website is more likely to get a step up with one link from a high-quality website than with 100 links from 100 low-quality sites. It is difficult to determine exactly how good or bad a website is for links, but a good way to measure it is by assessing the site's Page Rank. So how do you get more links?
a. Create high-quality content, the kind that people would want to pass around to their friends.
b. Use social media to spread your content, whether it is job profiles of an interesting piece of recruitment news.
2. Anchor Texts - Google also examines the anchor text for inbound links and compares it against the targeted keywords in your website. It is important not to use 100% keyword anchor texts because Google is suspicious of websites that are perfectly optimized.
It is essential to be familiar with these strategies for increasing targeted applicant traffic to your recruitment website. However, it is not at all necessary to be so engrossed in all the technical details of SEO that you forget what your recruitment business is all about. Technology is every great recruiter's friend, but only if it is used to make the hiring process fast, seamless and effective.
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