SEO Your Job Ads: No Experts Needed

If your job advertisements are yielding poor results, there could be a number of reasons why you’re not seeing much action. Even the best job advertisements can be left unseen if they’re not optimized to appear in relevant search engine results. Did you know organic search is the number 1 driver of traffic to a webpage? While you don’t need to be an SEO expert to optimize your job advertisement messaging, you do need to use these simple tips.

Research: Finding the Best Keywords

Sign up for a free trial with SEMrush.com (my favorite SEO tool ever) and get to work on researching keywords you think best fit the job you’re advertising. SEMrush allows you to search keywords just like you’re in Google, but it analyzes the keyword to show how much it’s searched on a monthly basis so you know if it’s valuable or not. If the keyword returns no results, then you don’t want to consider it valuable.

Your monthly search rate may come back as 20 – 20k searches a month, but it’s the competition rank you should pay attention to next. You want to pull a list of keywords that have a high monthly search rate and a low competition rate. This way, you know many people are searching for it, but it won’t be as difficult to appear in the results.

Don’t know where to start? – If you’re having trouble with keywords, head to Google and pretend you’re a job seeker. What queries would your ideal job seeker type in to hopefully get to your job advertisement? Make a list and then test our your ideas to see if they’re worth being implemented into your job advertisement.

Implement: Optimizing the Job Advertisement

Once you’ve found the best keywords your job advertisement should appear in Google results for, you’ll need to make sure you’re using the terms correctly and not in a way that will hurt your job ad’s credibility with Google. One of the best ways to optimize any page on the web is to give it backlinks for the keyword it most wants to be known for. This is going to take a little outside help, because you can’t backlink your own job advertisement to itself. Start a blog, or post your job advertisements on a hosted site and then link the specific keyword to your actual job advertisement. This gives that job advertisement a backlink, which Google sees as a credibility source. The more backlinks your job ad gets for relevant keywords, the better chance it has to be moved up in rank.

Don’t know where to start? – Find out if your company has a career page or a candidate-facing blog. You can post small blurps at the beginning or end of existing articles to advertise jobs and earn those backlinks!

“The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page has.”  – QuickSprout

So what are you waiting for? Build that job advertisement page into your career page now!

Track: Maintain and Improve Rankings

You’ve gone to all of this work, so you definitely don’t want to give up after you’re done implementing the keywords. SEO requires ongoing management because Google ranking factors change and hundreds of thousands of new web pages are created every day. In 2013, 822,240 new web pages were created each day… and we can only assume the number has continued to grow. While you’re not competing against every page on the internet, you’re probably competing with a few thousand to a few hundred thousand. Don’t let all of your hard work go to waste. You can track and manage the organic search traffic of your job advertisements by running analytics on the words you’re using to look for relevant, higher quality words you can interchange. You also can use Bit.ly links to track how well your links are performing on the job advertisement.

Don’t know where to start? – Sign up for a job distribution software that tracks and analyzes how your job advertisements perform. You’ll be able to glean data regarding who your audience is so you can tailor your messaging and keywords to fit their search patterns.

With these tips you can be on your way to creating job advertisements that return results. You can write the most clever job advertisement in the industry, but if it’s not optimized for SEO, then nobody is going to see it.

What SEO practices have you found to work best for job advertisements? Share with me in the comments.

The Branchers

We build the best damn marketing campaigns on the planet. And we do it for industries and companies you might not identify as easy to market (right away). Working here takes a very special kind of person.