Often companies take into account all of the factors that influence a candidate once they’re on a careers site. Have you considered, however, how they find your site in the first place? That’s where SEO comes in – the process of optimising a site to increase its visibility in search engines. Despite the glaring importance of SEO, this practice is not always fully understood, and is often an underestimated tool within the recruitment world.
Why should SEO be part of your recruitment strategy?
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It builds credibility – if candidates see your company listed in search results for terms related to your business, it will build a picture of credibility and value. By ranking highly, you will no doubt be putting candidates at ease and instilling confidence in them that you’re a noteworthy employer.
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Candidates expect to be able to find you online – candidates want to be able to go to Google, put in their desired search terms, and find the results they need. If your business serves the interests of the candidate but doesn’t show up on the results page, then you’ve missed out on a golden opportunity.
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Deliver organic and targeted traffic – the beauty of SEO is that it sends people to your site when they’ve actively searched for specific terms relevant to it. As a result, they are the group most likely to effectively engage with your site, and unlike with other strategies, you won’t have directly paid to attract them to your site. The effort and money that may have been spent elsewhere is better focused on an SEO campaign that generates organic traffic.
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Increase your talent pipeline – there are many factors that go into increasing your talent pipeline, not just traffic alone. By employing SEO best practice, however, you will be increasing your site’s exposure, having with a greater number of candidates interacting with your site, and having more people likely to apply to roles to increase your candidate pipeline.
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Results should be long-term, not one-off – results won’t happen overnight, as optimising your SEO instead pays off significantly over time. The more the site is visited, the more conversions take place, and result in better ROI and lower cost per hire.
Key elements of SEO
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Understand your audience – before implementing your SEO strategy, you need to first distinguish what kinds of candidates you want to attract to your company. From here you can then research what it is your candidates might be looking for.
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Link building – Links are an important element of SEO as Google uses links to decipher how important your site is, and ultimately how valuable this information is to your audience. Cross-link where possible to establish page authority in search engines.
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Don’t forget the keywords – Incorporate keywords which are relevant to your company’s needs for which candidates are likely to be searching, and intersperse them throughout your content.
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Clear URLS – if the URL is merely a sequence of meaningless numbers and symbols, your candidate can’t glean any information from this. If the URL contains relevant keywords, it increases the likelihood of the candidate clicking through and converting.
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Optimised title tags and meta descriptions – SEO friendly and optimised meta titles and descriptions will help with your page ranking. In addition, these titles and descriptions should be compelling enough for a candidate to want to engage with your content.
What do we stand to gain through better SEO?
SEO is a hugely important factor at the very foundation of ensuring recruitment marketing is effective that is often overlooked. There are countless benefits to SEO, many of which have direct wider influence across the impact and effectiveness of other marketing strategies, and so companies using best practice stand to gain a lot and outstrip their competitors.
