Driving high quality candidates to your Job Board using Search Engines
On average 51% of job seekers looking for a new job use Internet search engines like Google to seek out relevant job postings.
Furthermore 90% of job seekers never look past the first two or three pages of results and many only view the first page before changing either search engine or search query.
If your job board isn’t easy to find in the search engine results then you could be missing out on a large share of targeted traffic.
So what can recruiters and job board owners do to
maximise their chances of harnessing the power
of search engines?
Here is our 10 point plan to help you attract quality candidates:
1 - Understand your candidates' job hunting behaviour and carry out keyword research to find out what key phrases they might be searching on.
2 - Use both search engine optimisation (HR SEO) and pay per click advertising to improve your visibility in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN
3 - Make sure your own site and job search facility is easy to use and keeps users engaged. A poorly designed job board will only get users hitting the back button and returning to the search results to check out your competition (job seekers visit on average 5 sites when looking for a job).
4 - Make sure your webpages that contain the jobs ads can be followed by the search engine spiders that crawl your site. If you have a dynamic site set up a Google SiteMap
5 - Use appropriate keywords in the job adverts and accompanying descriptions contained within the site, especially in the page title tag and on-page content.
6 - Syndicate jobs on to other major lifestyle portals and industry websites and get a XML feed into Google Base.
7 - Establish highly visible links form authoritative sites that can help you reach your target audience, such as University careers & recruitment pages.
8 - Integrate your search marketing activity with other elements of the marketing mix, e.g. with PR and distribute press releases and editorial online.
9 - Blog & Post – if you have something exciting or interesting to say do it through a Blog or a forum post, or even a Podcast if you are that daring.
10 - Invest in a decent web analytics tool. That way you can measure the behaviour of visitors that come on to your site; identify where they came from; what specific key phrases they used to find you, and whether or not they applied for a post.
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