Career Site Optimization and Your HR SEO Goals

The ultimate goal of any career site optimization campaign is twofold. 

    1. Drive targeted, highly qualified job seekers to a corporate career website.

    2. Grow the employer’s brand by getting high search engine rankings for pages that contain content that’s related to the keyword strings that potential employees use when using the search engines to conduct their job search.

It seems like every day a new company is trying to get into the HR SEO business.  All of these vendors are selling pretty much the same thing, usually manifested something like “we will get your jobs out of your ATS, build a micro-site to host them, and then optimize it for the search engines, sending those applicants back into your ATS”.

While this approach does create optimized job pages for Google to find, the problem is that the neither of the two primary goals of the SEO campaign are met.  This will NOT lead to job seekers applying to your jobs.  No job seekers will find these pages- it’s not enough just to structure a page so that Google can see it, you have to actively get back links, as well- so no brand authority will be achieved.

Here is why. 

You absolutely have to have pages that are optimized for keyword phrases that job seekers are actually using in their job hunt.  If no one on Google is using the phrase “electronic assembly jobs in Des Moines, Iowa” (and they aren’t) in the search engines, it doesn’t matter how much time or money you put into optimizing that page- because no one is searching that keyword phrase.  No one searching means no one finding your pages means no one applying to your jobs.  Can you remember the last time you used Google and went deeper than the first or maybe the second page of results? Chances are you don’t do that very often.  In fact, research shows that more than 85% of all traffic is driven by the results on the first page- so top 10 or top 20 rankings are all that really matter.  If you’re optimizing for a search string that has 4 or more words in it, being on page two means being irrelevant, because there are so few people using that search string that even if you get all the traffic in a month, you’re only getting maybe 100 extra views on your pages.  That’s not going to drive traffic!

So, does anything actually work?

You absolutely have to conduct research on keyword phrases first.  You do this by researching a list of keyword search strings that your jobseeker audience is likely to use, and from that you develop a list of “keyword phrases” that you can promote to push your job openings.  Only after you have done this research can you work on creating a “landing page” for your jobs, specifically designed to rank in the top 10 results for the specific phrase you choose.  Again, the key to SEO is knowing what your job seekers are typing into Google.  Then, and only then, do you know what phrases you need to optimize pages for.  Once your landing page is optimized, most vendors will offer to help “submit” that page to the various search engines.

This is a relatively easy process.

However, you can’t stop there. The above steps will probably get you into the Google index, but you probably will not be on page 1 of the search engine results for your keyword phrase. Chances are, you probably won’t even be on page 3 or 4, depending on how competitive the keyword phrase is.  The last step on your path to SEO success is also the most time consuming, difficult and expensive part of the process.  However, without the proper marketing, your landing pages and career site are identical to everyone else’s.  You must obtain back links from other high-quality and well-thought-of websites to be seen as the authority.

In summary, there are 3 critical steps in SEO:

    1. Doing keyword research to determine what will build your brand and drive traffic.

    2. Implementing web pages that are optimized for those keywords.

    3. Conducting a marketing strategy for these landing pages that builds credibility and authority for them. 

Any SEO strategy that does not make use of all 3 of these aspects is destined to fail, and that failure will be measured by the distinct lack of new job seekers to your SEO micro site or career site.