Check out our free webinar on SEO for HR and Recruiting by clicking here or check out our SEO basics guide for jobs feed and job opening announcements happening online.
Career Keywords and SEO Online Job Postings
For HR professionals and recruiters, search engine optimization (SEO) might seem like a foreign language. But having the right keywords and other SEO strategies can help you target job candidate traffic to your job postings or career page. With millions of job seekers using search engines to find jobs, it’s pretty clear the power SEO holds.
But to get the big picture, 75 percent of Internet users never scroll past the first page of search results. What’s more is search and email are still the top two activities on the Internet. From an HR perspective, SEO can greatly help (or hurt) your job marketing efforts.
Tips to Optimize Your Job Opening & Announcement
But before you start throwing keywords around to announce your job opening, consider the following tips on what you might not know or understand about SEO:
Just because you’re using SEO doesn’t mean you’re attracting the right candidates.
As with any marketing or PR effort, it’s important to know your audience. This means considering keywords and alternatives that will drive the right job candidates to your page or posting. The one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work with SEO (or anything really). If or when you integrate SEO strategies into your job posting creation, add this question to your list when consider keywords: Who is my ideal candidate?
Thinking like the job seeker will help you define the best SEO keywords.
Similar to my first point, knowing your audience will help you select the best keywords. But what’s even better than knowing your audience? Thinking like them. If you’re looking for an entry-level software developer, how will your ideal candidate search for this position? Use the words they are going to use, not what you think they should use. Also, consider including specific qualifications or locations in your keywords to refine their search.
Modifying your job posting headline and URL to consider keywords makes a difference.
While this sounds like a small difference, it’s all part of a solid SEO strategy. When writing your job posting, remove words like ‘an,’ ‘the,’ or ‘and’ from the URL. You should also use the same keywords you selected in the first two tips in your headline. All of the small edits can truly make a difference in your SEO strategy and drive more traffic to your page.
SEO is determined by more than just keywords.
SEO also involves backlinks and trackback URLs from other websites. In other words, the more your careers page or job posting is shared on social media, emailed, or linked on blogs and websites, the higher it will be ranked in a search engine. This means you need to consider your online presence as a whole when posting job content, as well. Make your jobs shareable via social media or email and share the content yourself via your business’s social media channels.
PPC is not SEO for job opening announcements.
PPC ( short for pay per click) is not an SEO job posting strategy. These are the ads on Google that are posted at the top and to the right hand side of the page. Depending on how it is being used, pay per click campaigns can be expensive with Amazon spending over $54 million in the first half of 2012 to sell their wares using Google PPC campaigns.
Do Industry Specific Keywords or Online Job Boards Work Best for SEO?
The world of search engine optimization is a large — and there’s a lot to know. But if you’re just as strategic in your job content creation as you are in your SEO strategy, you’ll find that traffic to your job content will increase.
How has using SEO improved searches to your career page or job postings? What tools, services, or strategies are you employing to help leverage SEO to elevate your online posting announcements using your own careers page or online job boards?
Check out our free webinar on SEO for HR and Recruiting by clicking here or check out our SEO basics guide for jobs feed and job opening announcements happening online.
