How To Choose An Effective HRSEO Partner

Any successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign attempts to meet two goals.

1. Drive highly targeted job seeker traffic to the corporate website.

2. Increase an employer’s brand, through obtaining high search engine rankings for pages that contain content related to the keyword strings that job seekers are using to search for jobs.

It seems like every day a new company is trying to get into the HR SEO business. All of these vendors are selling pretty much the same thing, usually manifested something like “we will get your jobs out of your ATS, build a micro-site to host them, and then optimize it for the search engines, sending those applicants back into your ATS”.

While this approach will likely lead to pages that are optimized for the search engines to find, it’s still got the problem that it’s not meeting the two stated goals of any SEO campaign. There is nothing about building an SEO-optimized page that will lead to more job seekers applying for your jobs. You aren’t building the brand because it isn’t enough to structure a page so that Google can see it- you have to get quality sites to link to the pages you want to promote or no job seekers will find your pages.

Here is why.

It’s very important that you optimize these micro-sites for the keyword phrases that job seekers are actually using to look for jobs in the search engines. For example, you could make a page optimized for the phrase “third grade teacher jobs in Elkhart, Indiana”; however, no one is going to type that into the Google, Yahoo! Or MSN search box. It doesn’t matter how much time or money you spend promoting a page if no one is going to search using the keyword phrase you’re optimizing for, because if they aren’t searching that way they certainly aren’t going to find and apply for your jobs. When was the last time you searched Google and went to Page 2 of the results? Chances are, not very often. In fact, some results show that this happens less tha
10% of the time. Top 10 and Top 20 rankings are all that really matter. In fact, when optimizing for any “search string” that has 4 or more words in it, page 2 doesn’t even matter, because there are so few people searching on these phrases, (i.e. “search traffic”), that 10% of 100 searches in a month is only 10 people… That is NOT going to drive candidates to your website.

So, does anything actually work?

You absolutely have to conduct research on keyword phrases first. You do this by researching a list of keyword search strings that your jobseeker audience is likely to use, and from that you develop a list of “keyword phrases” that you can promote to push your job openings. You can only then begin to build a “landing page” for your jobs, specifically designed and coded to rank in the top 10 results for the particular phrase you chose to use to attract jobseekers to your jobs. Again, the key to SEO is knowing what your job seekers are typing into Google. Then, and only then, do you know what phrases you need to optimize pages for. After your page has been optimized, typically, an SEO vendor will help to “submit” and promote the page with Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.

This doesn’t take a lot of work.

That, however, is not your stopping point. The steps outlined above will most likely get you indexed by Google, but not on page one. If it’s a competitive phrase, you’re not going to be on page 1, 2, 4, or 4, either. The final step of the SEO process is also the most time consuming, difficult and expensive process. Without the proper marketing of your career site and its associated landing pages, your pages are no different from anyone else’s. To be considered an authority, and therefore rank highly, you have to pursue back links from other, high-quality websites.

In closing, there are 3 crucial steps to any successful SEO campaign.

1. Doing the proper keyword research to figure out how to drive jobseekers to your career site while building your brand.

2. Implementing web pages that are optimized for those keywords.

3. Marketing the landing page that builds authority and credibility for these new pages.

Any SEO strategy that does not make use of all 3 of these aspects is destined to fail, and that failure will be measured by the distinct lack of new job seekers to your SEO micro site or career site.