Optimising your job listing can help to ensure that they are discoverable by potential candidates and improve the quality of hires. To attract the right pool of candidates, incorporating online marketing tactics like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can extend the reach of your job listing and improve the search engine ranking of your company’s website. Falling for the generic “copy and paste” option across several job listings does little to streamline the pool of candidates you are looking to interview.
With companies vying for top candidates, investing time into crafting a well-written, optimised and informational job listing is key to attracting top talents to send in a job application. In today’s increasingly competitive job market, features like Google For Jobs aggregating salaries and reviews across multiple sites makes luring in the right candidates harder if you ignore SEO in job posting. A job description without commonly-searched keywords will lose out on generating a higher quantity of the right traffic to the listing.
Pitting your job listings against thousands online can be tricky when you are attempting to lure top-notch performers from other companies. Avoid the murky pitfalls of a poorly-worded job listing in todays’ competitive job market by following these 4 steps!
1. Keyword research
Whether you are a marketer or corporate recruiter, figuring out the right keyword combinations that your target pool of candidates and competition use is pivotal to shaping your SEO strategy in optimising the job listings. Using an online keyword evaluation and research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner is a good starting point in initiating an SEO-optimised strategy in your job listing. Job listings without keyword optimisation is a sure-fire way to miss out on the possible traffic you could be generating towards your posting.
Other Google tools include:
While optimising the keywords can increase your job listing ranking on Google, loading your webpage with an unnecessary amount of keywords creates a risk of penalty by search engines due to its unnatural and manipulative occurrence.
2. Landing pages
Landing pages exist independently of your main company site. A focused landing page maximises the company’s presence to job seekers by providing valuable information on the role and the company itself. Wanting to attract quality hires necessitates an impressive job posting to convince them. Optimising your landing page is one way to do so. Taking stock of user intent can benefit the process of building your job advertisements’ landing pages. Optimising several segments of your job advert landing page can lead to greater rates of discovery and conversions.
Some of these segments include:
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- Meta DescriptionYour meta description provides a short description of what your page is all about. Weaving in your keywords can improve the quality of the tag as well. Though it depends, best practices indicate the optimal length of meta tags to be within 160 characters. To drive a higher volume of traffic to your page, your meta description should encompass persuasiveness and quality by employing the keywords targeted during your research in a natural way. Likewise, it is vital that you create unique meta descriptions for each job advert landing page or you would end up with the same descriptions for all the different jobs listed when searched for on Google.
- URLOptimising the URL of your page helps search engines to better categorise your job listing as well. Inserting your keywords into the URL and making it as readable as possible gives your job listing a much higher chance of pulling more traffic in. Concise URLs make for a better user experience and every link, tweet and share affects some fraction of the traffic your job post is garnering.
- Page Title TagAs your page title will appear on search result listings, plugging in your targeted keywords will aid in maximising the SEO value of your job listing. As the page title is also one of the first few elements that potential recruits will look at, optimally describing what your page in 50 to 60 characters works best. Contrary to the belief that unique page titles attract more attention, avoiding jargon is your best bet in showcasing reliability.
- Website Load SpeedThe site speed refers to the amount of time it takes for your site to load after it has been clicked. It is no surprise that delays in your website’s loading speed can lower the amount of traffic toward your job listings. Apart from influencing your site’s ranking, the load speed is crucial in ensuring a user-friendly experience for job seekers – especially for today’s technologically-savvy candidates. Before optimising your code and reducing the number of redirects, using a page audit tool like Google PageSpeed can help you identify the problems that should be fixed for improved loading speed.
Read Also: How to Attract and Engage the Digital Candidate: Part 1
3. Third-party job sites
Apart from making the job listing on your careers page SEO-friendly, posting them on third-party sites makes them eligible to show up in the Google for Jobs feature. Some of the other third-party job sites include:
- Glassdoor
- Monster
Likewise, with job-to-skills matching technology and government-support initiatives, MyCareersFuture is a citizen-centric job posting platform that helps connect employers to competent job seekers.
4. Go social
Beyond job sites, sharing your job listings on the company’s social media pages like LinkedIn and Facebook can help extend your reach to a wider pool of candidates. Getting your staff to share the listings aids in expanding the professional networks that are viewing the job as well — which gives rise to better chances of recruiting someone already in your network. Likewise, using visuals such as videos and photos that highlight the company culture, working environment and achievements are likelier to get a higher rate of engagement.
When the job market is this competitive today, every little bit of effort that goes into your job listing matters as well. Optimising the job listings on your company careers page and third-party job sites can make that difference in attracting quality hires into your network.
