To ensure that your company’s career opportunities are seen by as many desired candidates as possible, it’s important to optimize your recruitment page so it’s uber easy for search engines to index it. There are various ways to drive visitors to your site, but search engine optimization (SEO) is the most likely to not only attract those candidates, but also convert them into viable applicants.
It’s all about free, results-oriented traffic.
SEO means you’re doing your best to rank high on Google: thus, the common use of “google” as a verb. It’s become a synonym for “search.” And justifiably so, as more than 90 percent of all search traffic is concentrated there. Equally impressive is the fact that more than half of all clicks end up on the top three search results. So, millions of pages are vying for those coveted three positions. Last but not least, once you reach them, it becomes pretty difficult to knock you back down again.
When you’re at the top of search results, you’re receiving free traffic that’s ready to take action. How do you beat out your competition to make this happen?
Make your content readable at a glance.
Just like your candidates, Google wants to know at a glance what a page is all about. Make your content as user-friendly as possible – and Google will approve. One helpful tip is to add headers and header tags. Use short, succinct headers and sub-headers and break up blocks of text to make them more readable.
- Another consideration: Would separate industry-specific pages work for you? For instance, you may want a page for warehousing jobs, a page for clerical jobs, etc. Or if you specialize solely in healthcare, perhaps a page for nursing, a page for allied jobs, and so forth.
Use meta descriptions on landing pages.
Meta descriptions are HTML attributes providing a brief summary of your page. These summaries appear when your page is returned as part of a search engine result. Make sure your recruitment page has a meta description with relevant keywords in it.
- About those keywords: Proper keyword research is key to your content strategy as you aim for organic site traffic. Target those that will help drive visitors there even if they weren’t searching for your company by name. There are SEO tools you can use for this purpose.
Add alt descriptions to images.
Images make your text more engaging and even more importantly, allow you to add keywords to image attributes that are crawled by search engines. Google attaches a fairly high level of importance to this alt text, as it is important in improving accessibility for anyone who can’t view an image on a page.
Shoot for intuitive site navigation.
Make sure pages that are integral to the candidate experience – such as Current Openings and Benefits – are only a click or two away from your home page. Stick with simple, intuitive site navigation that makes sense.
SEO is a lot to take in. The Haley Marketing team can help you weed through it all and maximize ROI on your career site, as well as achieve optimal results in all areas of your recruitment marketing. Contact us today to set up a free, 30-minute recruitment marketing brainstorming session.