When recruiters think SEO and Google rankings, they assume that Indeed and job boards dominate the search result pages, and that careers sites for both individual businesses and companies with career boards don’t stand a chance when it comes to competing with them.
But is this common misconception stopping you from investing in SEO? Many employers believe that their careers site cannot outrank job boards and aggregators such as Indeed, TotalJobs and Glassdoor.
Why should you invest if you can’t outrank? What if we told you that it is possible to have your careers site achieve first page search results, top positions and in some cases, even outrank Indeed?
We were able to achieve this for industry leaders, including PokerStars, Virgin Atlantic and the John Lewis Partnership across both niche and less specialised areas.
Proving the misconception wrong
Google’s algorithms are getting better all the time. Over the last couple of years, they’ve become better at both identifying user intent and using machine learning and AI to continuously refine search results to meet users’ expectations. This means that if your SEO is done in line with best practice and with a long-term approach consistent with Google’s vision for search, then having your careers site outrank job boards is within your reach.
That’s where we come in.
At Enhance Media, our work is underpinned by research and data. Our team use technical expertise and innovation to deliver solutions that help our clients improve their recruitment marketing.
By bringing our clients’ SEO strategies in line with Google’s focus on intent and optimising copy for BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and MUM (Multitask Uniform Model), we have proven over and over again that careers sites can rank high in search results and attract high-quality talent.
Reaching new heights as an associated employer
Outranking the likes of Indeed and Glassdoor in Google search is often easier for employers who associate themselves with a particular recruitment niche. This is known as a job taxonomy.
A theoretical example of a job taxonomy would be a company that deals in dairy. This company would likely have a taxonomy in dairy industry-related roles, just like a bakery would have a taxonomy in baking roles.
One case study that proves that the common misconception in question can be defeated is Virgin Atlantic. Highly associated by Google and candidates alike for their Cabin Crew and Pilot recruitment, Enhance Media undertook SEO and copywriting work to enrich their careers site in order to achieve our end goal. Google now sees the different SEO factors created which ensures a higher ranking even for unbranded searches – for example, a candidate searching ‘Pilot jobs’ receives Virgin Atlantic’s dedicated page before both job boards and other competitors.
Another employer associated with a job taxonomy is the John Lewis Partnership which includes both John Lewis & Partners and Waitrose & Partners. They partnered with us to ensure their SEO was attracting new talent as efficiently as possible. By applying similar strategies as what was effective for Virgin Atlantic, a basic Google search of the terms ‘Supermarket Assistants’ in Google shows their current standing when prospective candidates browse similar roles:
Already invested in your employer brand? If you are recognised as an industry leader within a particular niche, then using a defined SEO approach can provide a quick win for associating with taxonomies that are proven for you, for example Virgin Atlantic and pilots/cabin crew.
Improving your ranking as an unassociated employer
Let’s break it down with what we did for global sports betting, gaming and entertainment giant PokerStars.
You would associate gaming and perhaps even customer service roles with PokerStars. An area of jobs not often associated with them, however, would be Project Managers and Data Analysts. Through our tried and tested approach to SEO, we successfully ranked PokerStars’ careers site on the first page of Google’s results, outranking Glassdoor and other job boards through a simple search of the role title and location.
We’ve seen how the right approach to SEO can help you outrank job boards and competitors when having a job taxonomy, but this is also the case for unassociated employers too, or more simply companies that don’t necessarily have a niche or particular associated role.
If you want to develop your recruitment marketing strategy and see how we can help you reach out to new candidates in Google by outranking job board and aggregators, visit our site or get in touch today.
Enhance Media – The science behind online recruitment.