Attracting Top Talent With Recruitment SEO
Talent Treasure Hunt: Recruiting top candidates is increasingly difficult due to fierce competition in the job market.
Recruiting SEO to the Rescue: Better SEO practices can help you reach the specific candidates you want to work with.
Lower Cost of Recruitment : Organic success for your job ads can reduce your spending per new hire.
Finding top talent has never been easy, but a hyper-competitive job market makes it more challenging than ever.
With new technologies comes more ways to reach candidates you may miss otherwise and amongst all the tech-driven trends out there, search engine optimization (SEO) is one that can have a greater impact on your recruiting effort than most.
In this article, I’ll dig into recruitment SEO, show you how to use it in your recruiting efforts and how to overcome some of the common challenges around SEO for recruiters.
What Is SEO?
SEO is the practice of fine-tuning a webpage to land higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s a critical part of content marketing today, with many businesses using it to get more traffic from users searching for things related to their products or services.
It has grown to the point where it’s now virtually impossible to appear toward the top of a SERP without SEO, so it deserves your attention.
While SEO is widely known as a marketing tool, it can also help your recruitment efforts. Once you use recruitment software to streamline the hiring process, you can deploy SEO to make your job more visible and kick-start that pipeline. After all, a great candidate's experience only matters if people can find employment opportunities.
Why is SEO important in recruiting?
Using a mix of tactics is one of the most effective recruiting strategies, and SEO must be one of these methods. Making your career pages appear before others on a SERP means job-seekers will see your listings before your competitors. It also helps you reach candidates who may not see you on other platforms.
Roughly 75% of potential candidates start their job searches on Google. A staggering 84% have applied for positions through search engines.
Given how dominant SERPs have become in the employment market, you’re not reaching your full potential if you aren’t optimizing your performance here.
SEO also lets you target searches related to your company, not just to jobs. You can use that to find passive candidates who are great fits for your team but may not look for openings otherwise. It’s also worth considering that SEO is fairly low-cost, so it’s a great way to lower your spending during recruitment.
How To Use SEO In Your Recruiting Efforts In 5 Steps
Recruitment SEO works largely the same as marketing-focused SEO. Recruiting professionals may be unfamiliar with this process, so here’s a rundown on optimizing your SERP performance.
Step 1: Understand how content ranks
First, you must understand how search engines — primarily Google — rank content. Google considers a few key factors:
- Quality of Your Content: Google wants to show users content that is most valuable and engaging to them. Consequently, high-performing pages are factual, up-to-date, and easy to read.
- Keywords in Copy: Keywords and key phrases are how search engines match pages to searches. Your content should contain enough keywords in common with your target audience’s queries so Google knows it’s relevant. Remember that synonyms and related phrases count, too.
- Images: Websites with images tend to perform better than those without. However, pictures are also the largest contributor to page size, and if yours takes too long to load, it can hurt your SEO. File compression can help, and remember to add alt text to all photos to boost their accessibility.
- Expertise: Google also prefers authoritative content. You can build authority by covering several topics in your niche and offering factual, original information. This will encourage other sites to link to you as a reference. Expertise is just one part of what Google considers as part of its E-E-A-T evaluation of content, or Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
Step 2: Keyword research
Once you know the basics of SERP rankings, you should determine what searches to target to attract top talent. Here’s how to research keywords to find and draw in the right people for the job.
Creating a list of relevant terms
Start by compiling a list of words and phrases related to the position you want to fill. You can look at competitors’ job listings and blog posts for inspiration on keywords you may have missed. Remember that relevant keyphrases vary between the different stages of the recruitment funnel, too.
Conducting SEO keyword research
Next, find the search volumes and competition for each of these keywords to determine their value. There are plenty of SEO tools that will show you these metrics.
You should also look at user intent and related searches for each phrase to improve your targeting. One simple way to do this is to look at the “people also ask” section of the SERP. Reddit threads or other forums are also good places to understand what exactly your searchers are after.
Prioritizing keywords
Use this data to sort your keywords to find the most valuable to target. Rank them by search volume, ease of ranking — the lower the competition, the better — and how well the user intent aligns with your ideal candidate profile. Your focus should be on the top few keyphrases and their related terms.
Step 3: On-page SEO optimization
After determining your target keywords, you can craft more SEO-friendly pages around them. Here are some elements to pay special attention to.
- Page Title: Your title should contain your primary keyword and be between 45 and 60 characters, including spaces.
- Subheadings: Break long pieces of text into subsections of at most 300 words. Include keywords in at least a few of the headings of these sections.
- First 100 Words: Your main keyword should be within your first 100 words. Ideally, it’ll be in the first paragraph.
- Metadata: Write your own meta description, ensuring you include the primary keyword and keep it within 160 characters. You should also put target keyphrases in the alt text for any images.
- Multimedia: Variation helps you stand out and engages users more, so including multiple forms of media is great for SEO. Use images, infographics, and video, as long as they don’t slow load times too drastically and are relevant to your content.
- Internal and External Links: You can build authority by linking to other pages on your site. Linking to a few external references will also help, but ensure you only link to noncompetitors. Linked pages should be primary sources and four years old at most.
Step 4: Technical SEO considerations
Similarly, Google considers a few technical factors you should optimize.
- URL Structure: Your URL should be as simple and descriptive as possible. For job vacancies, a URL like /vacancy/front-office-coordinator is better than /vacancy/267830. You can often use your focus keyphrase alone as a URL.
- Page Speed: The slower your page loads, the less convenient it is to users. While Google says relevance is its top ranking factor, speed gives a relevant page a boost. You can improve page load times by using a good hosting service, compressing images, and reducing redirects.
- Duplicate Content: Repeating content on different pages will confuse search engines, hindering your rankings. You can avoid this by searching your website for target keywords to check if you’ve covered the topic already. Remember, you can always refresh old pages instead of making a new one.
- Alt Tags: Use descriptive alt text for images to help search engines recognize and index them correctly. These should include keywords where possible.
- Indexing: Google indexes websites automatically, but you can ensure it does so correctly through a few steps. Creating a sitemap, practicing good internal linking, and asking Google to reindex your site after updating will help.
Step 5: Measure SEO progress
You must monitor your SEO performance over time. Start by setting clear goals, then check key data metrics related to these targets.
With 25% of organizations gathering a higher volume of data than they can process, it’s important to know exactly what you want to track and figure out how they influence your recruitment KPIs.
A few common SEO indicators that are crucial to measure include:
- Number of Organic Visitors: Google Analytics will reveal how many people visit your page from SERPs, including what links drove this traffic.
- Conversion Rate: Measure how many visitors apply for jobs. Asking applicants to specify how they learned of the position will reveal which SEO efforts made the biggest difference.
- Time on Page: Assess how long visitors stay on your page to gauge engagement — the higher the average dwell time, the better. You can also find this data in Google Analytics.
- Keyword Rankings: Check how high you perform for targeted keywords. You can do this by manually searching the phrase in question and looking for your page or through an SEO tool.
A reliable recruitment software solution’s features will include reporting capabilities that offer relevant data along these metrics. However, you may need outside tools like Google Analytics or a third-party SEO service to get more details.
Keys to Better SEO In Recruiting
SEO is probably not something you’re going to master as a recruiter and in truth, it doesn't necessarily make sense to as it’s just one aspect of your recruiting efforts. But here are some things to keep in mind as you look to improve your SEO practices.
Optimizing your careers page
Remember to optimize your general careers page, not just specific job postings and related blog content. Look at your competitors to compare how they list and describe jobs. Any gap between their offerings and your target audience’s search intent is an opportunity to provide what others are missing.
You can group similar job postings under common subheadings to facilitate easier navigation. Be sure to follow best practices when writing job descriptions, too. Include keywords for several searches, but don’t overload it. A few instances for each phrase is enough.
Your careers page is a great place to build authority. Link to specific job pages and other informational posts on your site to drive engagement and set yourself up as a one-stop shop for detailed information.
Content marketing for recruitment
Good SEO is incomplete without content marketing. After optimizing your career page and job listings, create posts about your industry or common problems and questions someone in a given role may have.
All this content should follow the same SEO principles as your job postings. You’ll also find they work better when you use a wider variety of media. Post blogs, create videos, and engage with candidates on social media to maximize your reach.
Local SEO for recruiting
You should also emphasize local SEO. SERPs are highly sensitive to location — a study of 1,000 law firms found that 56% ranked first for SERPs in their area. Because there can’t be 560 top-ranked pages on one SERP, results vary by the searcher’s region.
Ranking internationally is hard since there’s more competition, so focusing on local searchers will yield better results. A great way to do this is to include location-specific language across your pages, especially in titles and subheadings.
In your keyword research, emphasize users in areas you want to hire from.
Challenges Of Recruitment SEO
As helpful as recruitment SEO can be, it’s not without its challenges. You should consider common obstacles as you reshape your talent management strategy around this practice.
Competitive job market
The job market is crowded. There are more open positions than unemployed workers, so you have a lot of competition to stand out against.
Competing is often a matter of finding a narrower niche. Targeting a smaller, more specific audience with your SEO will make it easier to rank higher. Consider the locations where you want to hire people or craft a more detailed ideal candidate profile. You can also differentiate yourself by providing more content and addressing questions other employers fail to note.
Keeping up with SEO trends
You’ll also find that SEO best practices change over time. Google constantly tweaks its ranking factors, with larger updates every few years. Consequently, an SEO strategy that worked once won’t always deliver the same results.
Continuous monitoring is essential. Regularly check your SEO key performance indicators, noting when a page starts performing better or worse than normal. You can also check Google for developer updates and SEO publications to learn of larger changes and adapt your posts accordingly.
Measuring ROI
Tracking the return on SEO investments can also be challenging, as results don’t always come along monetary lines. You can work around this by measuring what you spend on recruitment now and applying this figure to your spending on SEO tools.
Good SEO will result in less spending per hire. You can also use tools like Google Analytics to track SEO-specific factors, which may offer a more detailed view of your performance.
Tips for SEO Success
SEO is complicated and always changing, but you need it to compete today.
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