It's more important now than it's ever been for recruiters to ensure their job adverts are optimised for SEO so they'll be picked up by search engines. As much as 67% of jobseekers start their job hunt using a search engine - so what can you do to ensure candidates see your job ads first?
With a well-planned SEO strategy, you'll get more traffic to your job pages and ensure your ready for Google for Jobs.
What's the point in spending time creating great job ads if candidates can't find them? Follow these tips to make your job ads stand out from the crowd.
1. Think about keywords
When posting your job ad, it's crucial to have a think about the kind of words relevant candidates would search for when looking for a job. For example, if you have a marketing role you're recruiting for that's based in London and offers felixible working, you'd want to ensure 'Marketing job in London' and 'flexible working' were both in there.
Try researching similar job postings to see what keyword combinations, information and skill sets that might've been overlooked by your hiring manager.
Once you've pin-pointed the relevant skills and qualifications needed for the job using an online keyword evaluation tool like Google’s Keyword Planner can help SEO optimise your job adverts.
The tool can provide information about the number of monthly searches a keyword gets and other common searched-for terms. Select a couple of keyword combinations to focus on spreading throughout your job advert, and think about adding them in to these places too...
Page Titles: This will appear on search result page listings, so this is the most beneficial spot to host a keyword. You'll have limited characters to work with here, and it helps to fit your keyword in earlier in the title for maximum SEO value.
Meta Description: These appear in search results as a description of what's on the page. Whilst meta descriptions previously had to be less than 160 characters, you can go for anything between 50-300 nowadays and it'll still pull through the most important (keyword-orientated) parts. Being clear about what's on the page using keyword tags will make your job advert rank higher in search engines.
URL: URLs are the actual website chain you see at the top of your web browser (e.g. www.firefishsoftware.com). They describe a site or page to visitors and search engines – and yes, they matter too!
Keeping them relevant, compelling and accurate is key to ranking well. Placing the job title and location in your URLs will help attract more jobseekers to your advert.
2. Be clear and concise
Even though placing keywords in your job advert can help boost your advert’s ranking in search engines - be careful not to go overboard. A couple per ad will suffice!
The most important thing you should do when writing your advert is to write with the jobseeker in mind - not search engines. If your advert is clear, descriptive and accurate for your job vacancy, you'll already be in Google’s good books.
Make sure the title of your job is clear and concise. If it is too vague and is a title that tells the job seeker nothing at all about the vacant position and what is involved, it is not going to be clear enough to be picked up by search engines.
An accurate job title is not only more likely to help when it comes to optimising your job advert for the web but it will have a lot less people skimming right past it too.
We have compiled loads of great advice on creating the perfect job ad!
3. Optimize for Google for Jobs
Google for jobs is set to make big changes to how candidates find job ads using search engines. Therefore, it's a good idea to take steps to optimize your job pages for this service!
There are four main steps you need to take to optimise your job ads so they'll appear in Google for Jobs search results.
Lucky for you, we have a great guide that will tell you what those steps are and how you can implement them today so you start immediately pulling in more (and more relevant!) traffic to your job pages.
Download the Google for Jobs Playbook below to get started.
