SEO for recruitment

1. SEO For Recruitment
Samuel Chatelain
August 2019

2. SEO Goals and KPIs
SEO objectives to achieve
1. Convert more traffic
onto applying to our
opened vacancies
2. Elevate our search
position for specific
keywords
SEO KPIs to monitor on a regular basis
• Organic Sessions
• KW ranking increase
• Conversion (GA goals/events)
• Bounce rate
• Pages / Session
• Avg. Session Duration
• Page load time
• Top Exit Pages
• Crawl Errors

3. SEO Essentials
Long term success
Technical
Efficiency
Content
Relevant
Keywords
Promotion
Authority to rank
Key factors for SEO success
• Site that looks the most relevant
to Google
• Site with the most engagement
such as tweets, likes or shares
• Site with the most links from
good websites
Google sweet box

5. SEO Audit (uk.gigroup.com)
Produced with non-confidential and non-proprietary data

6. SEO Audit (marksattins.co.uk)
Produced with non-confidential and non-proprietary data

7. SEO Audit (uk.intoo.com)
Produced with non-confidential and non-proprietary data

8. SEO Audit (tacktmiglobal.com)
Produced with non-confidential and non-proprietary data

9. Links and authority
Links
• Relevance
• Authority
• Anchor text
• Brand name and keywords
Authority
Home page
Category
page
Job page
Category
page
Job page
Category
page
Job page
Blog page

10. Creating an optimised site
structure
• Clearly organised and well-optimised sitemap
structure on our recruitment website plays a vital role
in user experience and search engine optimisation
• Improve site architecture helps crawlers discover and
revisit pages more quickly
• The art of planning a site structure is heavily
influenced by keyword buckets to be grouped into
different types and assign to page types
1. Category (practice) pages
2. Jobs (vacancy) pages
3. Jobs by area
4. Jobs by company names (DWP / BPDTS)
5. Popular/trending searches
6. Jobs by classification (entry level/part time / by
professional qualification)
7. Supporting content (salary, careers guides and so on)

11. Examples of Recruitment Sites
Michael Page features an animated home
banner image, clear CTAs and links to
featured roles, featured employer pages,
career tools and sector page links.
Telegraph jobs features links to sector
pages on their homepage, as well as career
news and featured jobs.

12. Best possible page and microsite
Improve cross-linking
• Create a sitemap that allows visitors to traverse
to the bottom of the architecture (jobs pages)
with as few clicks as possible.
• Develop navigational aids that can be inserted in
key areas (homepage, for example) to provide
extra links to critical, but deep sections of the site
architecture.
• links from the homepage to their location pages
will inevitably affect rankings of the individual
pages
• Optimise category pages (The golden rule: always
have well-written copy on your category pages)
• Search engines to crawl, index and rank your jobs
pages
• Site structure allows for your most recent jobs to
be displayed on your home page and internal
content pages
Key success factors
• Clearly KW target
• YMYL pages
• Authoritative authors
• Reputation
• Target landing pages not too
granular based on
• industry (e.g. engineering-jobs)
• location (e.g. jobs-in-Newcastle)
• not linked to career microsite in main
navigation but maybe in the site maps

13. Candidate Digital
Journey
According to Beamery.com, candidates
consume content based on what they’re
doing at the time, and what they fancy
reading, not how we draw it out on a
storyboard.
We therefore need content for every
eventuality to effectively move candidates
through the process.

14. Source of links and content relevance
Generate links
Inbound/outbound and Live/Active
Links
Personal
Relationships
Partnerships
PR
Content
Content relevance
• Industry trends (e.g. gender gap)
• What motivates people to share
• General trends (e.g. Brexit)
• Appealing visuals
• Research driven
• Long form
• Behavioural motivators
• How many influencers incorporated
• Leverage other people content

15. Testing new engaging content ideas
Multi-channel promotion
Test Content and multichannel channel
approach of promotion
1. Testing Tweeter headlines ads for
user intents before spending lots
time in order to get a proof of
relevance to audience
2. Native ads and editorial content
for great piece of content
3. Paid search
4. LinkedIn
Ideas of engaging content for
recruitment
1. First day fears: Hirers/new hires –
what to/not to say on the first
day – opinion from both sides
2. Infographics/listicles easily
digestible and sharable
3. Super hero CVs: simple
infographic on upcoming
Avengers film; if they weren't
superhero's what would they be
doing instead based on their
experience

16. Outreach content
Type of links
Authority
Mail Online
Brand
LinkedIn
Relevant
Indeed/Reed
Acquire links for £1K to £1.5K
• Bloggers
• Influencers

17. Keyword buckets using SEMrush
On-site
• Google planner keywords tool
for KW search
• SEMrush for gap analysis to
discover KW competitors
Looking at SEMrush’s data for glassdoor immediately
gives away their organic traffic strategy: capitalise on
the huge number of jobs available by brand name and
optimise to catch some branded traffic for “jobs at
[brand]” keywords:

18. Google
Google Search Engine Results Pages
(SERPs)
• Quality control of YMYL
• Best career relevant content
• Random spot checks on SERPs
Google search quality guidelines
E.A.T.
High level of
Expertise,
Authoritativeness
and Trustworthiness
Section 4.1
Y.M.Y.L.
Your Money Your
Life
Section 2.3
#3Bing
#2YouTube
#1Google
Image search
based on
specific Alt text

19. Technical SEO
Managing expired vacancies
Technical: still important
• Crawling and indexing
• URLs construct and optimisation
• Duplicate content
• Site speed
• Robots text
• 301 redirects
• Meta tags
Managing expired vacancies
• Google allows the placed vacancy
page to 404
• If temporarily unavailable,
communicate the date that we expect
to see it relisted
• Use the meta unavailable_after tag to
automate the process of expiry when
the job will be unavailable or display a
“job is no longer available” message.
• Set the page to no index and provide
links to currently available roles.

20. Mobile friendliness and geo-localisation
Mobile considerations: Evaluate microsite
for mobile friendliness or look at a mobile
application
Importance of location specific pages: implicit signals from
mobile device such as location will influence the type of search
results presented. This devices was located in London, and the
search query was simply, “jobs”.
How big is mobile recruiting? Via Mobile Recruiting in 2018: Trends and Insights
(Talentnow.com)

21. Google for jobs
Google for Jobs (GfJ)
• How to get into Google for Jobs
• Add mark-up to our job listings with job posting
structured data.
• Submit sitemap (or an RSS feed) providing a date for
each listing.
• Early adopter sees traffic growth
• KW: jobs, careers and work
• GfJ pack and widget
• Top of organic search
• Below the map pack
• Title
• Location
• Company name
• LinkedIn and Glassdoor but not Indeed
Optimise for GfJ
• Knowledge panel or graph
• Job posting guidelines
• Structured data
• Remove expired jobs
• Place structure data on job detail
page
• All job details present in JD
• Indexing API to notify Google of
updated content

22. Featured Snippets and Voice Search
Features Snippets
• Answer box
• Position zero
• Rich answer
• Direct answer
• Q&A
• Paragraph (81.9%)
• Bullet points/lists (10.7%)
• Table (7.3%)
• JD
Voice Search
• Pulling information from
featured snippets
• Google claims that 21% of
search are voice nowadays; 50%
by 2020

23. SEO Tools
Technical SEO Tools
•Screaming Frog
•Google Search
Console
•Google Analytics
•Web Developer
Toolbar
•WebPagetest
•Google Page Speed
Insights
•Google Mobile-
Friendly Testing Tool
•Google’s Schema.org
Structured Data
Testing Tool
•GTMetrix Page Speed
Report
•W3C Validator
•SEMrush
•Ahrefs
•Majestic
•Moz Bar
•Barracuda Panguin
•Google Search
Console XML Sitemap
Report
•BrightLocal
•Botify
Link Building Tools
•Link Research Tools
•Majestic
•Ahrefs
•Prospecting &
Outreach Tools
•Broken Link Builder by
Citation Labs
•Pitchbox
•BuzzSumo
•Ontolo
•BrightLocal
•Link Assistant
•Muck Rack
•Reporting Tools
•Google Sheets
•Agency Analytics
•Cyfe
Keyword Research
Tools
•Google Keyword
Planner
•Moz Keyword Explorer
•SEMrush
•Ahrefs Keywords
Explorer
•BrightEdge Data Cube
•Ubersuggest
•KeywordTool.io
Competitive Analysis
•SERP Analysis
•Searchmetrics
•SpyFu
•iSpionage
•SEMrush
•Ahrefs
•SERPstat
•BrightEdge
•Conductor
•Traffic Analytics
•SimilarWeb
•SEMrush Traffic
Analytics
•Alexa
•Quantcast
•Jumpshot
Rank Tracking Tools
•Web Browser Plugins
•WebCEO
•SEO Smart Suite
•Internet Business
Promoter
•Advanced Web
Ranking
•Desktop Applications
•Authority Labs
•AWRCloud
•Stat
•Dragon Metrics
•Linkdex
•BrightEdge
•Searchmetrics
•Conductor
•seoClarity
•Moz
Reporting Tools
•Agency Analytics
•SE Ranking
•SEMrush
•Google Data Studio
•Authority Labs
Browser Extensions &
Plugins
•Ghost Browser
•Chrome Developer
Tools
•SEO Quake
•User-Agent Switcher
•Tag Assistant
•Show Title Tag
•Ghost Proxy Control

25. SEO Project Plan: setting task, team and timing
Tasks to be performed for greater SEO
Task Team LT ST
Optimised site structure for best possible career microsite and
landing pages
Links building plan (e.g. PR and partnerships)
Keyword analysis / buckets / selections
Content relevance and outreach - blogs and press opportunities
Multi-channel promotion to improved shared links
Technical SEO incl. metadata, load speed and security optimisation
SERP - monitor ranking on selected search terms
Managing expired vacancies
Access to Google Plus My Business Page
Google Webmaster set up and verification
Mobile friendliness and geo-localisation
Google for Jobs
Featured Snippets and voice Search

26. Thank you for listening
Sources:
• builtvisible.com
• searchenginejournal.com
• searchengineland.com
• serpmarker.com
• wearebigrock.com