If you’ve had a website for your recruitment firm for any length of time, you probably have at least some rudimentary knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization). As aggregators become more and more dominant as the main way jobs are distributed online, it’s easy to lose sight of how important SEO still is for your website. I have a sneaking suspicion that “everyone” thinks job seekers head straight to sites like Indeed when they are searching for a new job. I’d like to suggest that a lot of job seekers, maybe even a majority of them, may *actually* start their job searches via Google, Bing, or another “regular” search engine. Did you know, for example, that Google reports more than 124 MILLION job-related searches each MONTH? And that Google Search is the #3 mobile app for smartphones? Or that Google also boasts 87.1% of the US mobile search market? (Thanks to our friends at Monster for gathering some of this data!) That adds up to a LOT of people doing a lot of job searching in places that are NOT aggregator sites. So, here are a few SEO tips for recruitment firms to help you reach some of these job seekers:
1. Make your jobs easy to find. Don’t bury them multiple pages deep into your site. Having a feed of your newest jobs on your home page is smart because, (a) your home page is *probably* your most-visited page and (b) continuously-refreshing content will keep the Google bots coming back to your site to index the new content.
2. Use “plain speak” URLs for your jobs – for example, www.abcrecruiting.com/engineering-jobs/senior-software-engineer as opposed to something like www.abcrecruiting.com/careers/223850928945?. Using keywords in real language makes it MUCH easier for search engines to find your content and return it in the search engine results pages.
3. Ideally, make sure each job is contained on its OWN page. Sites with deep content are consistently rated as more authoritative than sites with less content. Combining a well-optimized job description page with a word-based URL is still a great way to improve organic search results for your recruitment firm.
4. Pay attention to the meta description field. The meta description is the short snippet you see under the page title and URL in search engine results. It should be written in plain language, “match” the subject matter in the page title and URL, and be compelling enough that the searcher will click on the link.
5. Don’t forget mobile! If your website offers a poor mobile experience, Google is probably demoting your site in search results (or worse, removing it altogether).
Do you have any SEO tips for recruitment firms you can share?
