If you don’t know, SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of bringing better visibility to your website in search results. Search engines such as Google and Bing display what they determine to be the most relevant answer to a user’s search query.
The more relevant your content is to what the user is looking for, the better chance you have of being in the first few results on page one, which is the goal of SEO – to provide the signals that tell the search engines you are relevant.
Why does this matter to HR professionals? Because as many as 75 percent of job seekers conduct their job search using search engines like Google. Therefore, it’s important for your recruiting platform to be optimized to stand out in the results.
Optimized Career Sites and Job Listings
The two most important aspects of your recruiting platform that benefit from optimization are your career site and your job listings.
Obviously, your career site helps facilitate traffic to your job listings. By placing certain keyword indicators within the copy of your career site you can enhance the position of your organization in the search results.
Most job seekers look for their desired job titles at a location they prefer. Indicators, such as your organization’s name in the URL and in the web page content, take care of the location part of the equation. In other words, it’s pretty easy to rank for your own organization.
But when it comes to optimizing for opportunities in, let’s say your state, it gets a little tougher. For instance, If you search for “nursing careers in Florida,” it’s much harder to optimize for that since that query produces almost 5 million results.
You might also notice that most of the top results are populated by job aggregators like Indeed or Career Builder. These sites scrape your job listings and post your jobs on their site.
While this is free advertising for you, you are also competing with several other companies offering the same opportunities within another set of search results on these aggregators.
That’s a lot of clicks to get to your jobs.
Someone with SEO knowledge can provide assistance to help raise your career site above these aggregators and pull traffic directly to you so that as few clicks as necessary are required to find your jobs.
With the right optimization a lot of the time your job listings will appear directly in Google’s search results, skipping your career site and sites like Indeed. This is even better.
Mobile-Optimized Career Sites
Google has put a lot of emphasis on the importance of responsive design over the past few years, having provided several tools, like the Google Mobile-Friendly Test, and lots of information to help companies make the conversion.
This past April, the hammer came down when a Google algorithm change gave preference to sites that were optimized for tablets and smartphones, pushing non-optimized sites further back in the results. This can have a devastating effect if your company relies on organic traffic numbers to fill job requisitions.
Then in May, Google confirmed that mobile search has outpaced desktop search on their search engine.
The problem many organizations are having with the effects of the new algorithm is that while their career sites may be optimized, the transition to the job search isn’t. Often this area resides on an ATS which not only provides a non-optimized experience, it also offers no SEO capabilities. A double whammy.
That’s where third party vendors can help, by offering ATS overlays that can be optimized with SEO to making job listings available to the search engines.
Get Better Traffic Results with an SEO Strategy
As the number one source for candidate job searches, it’s critical to have a sound SEO strategy and a responsive design in place as part of your overall talent acquisition efforts.
Done right, you will experience higher growth in organic traffic over time.
Which brings me to a final point: SEO is not a “set it and forget it” technique. It requires ongoing testing and tweaking to ensure the success of your ranking strategy.
For those who use the RightJobNow platform, responsive design and SEO is included for each package, so you can focus on the business of recruiting while we manage the optimization for you.
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