SEO Tips to Boost Your Online Recruitment Efforts

If you are a recruiter, do you know how to find and attract suitable candidates to your online job offers? Optimizing your SEO can have a big impact.

Here’s what you need to know about SEO strategies in the recruitment industry.

Utilizing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques in your online recruitment efforts can significantly help you to entice potential clients to your webpage, and also to attract candidates to your job postings and vacancies.

How can SEO help?

SEO is a tool that will promote your website’s visibility on the search engine results pages. It can also enable your site to rank higher without the need for paid ads. You should utilize SEO in your online recruitment efforts to ensure your website:

• Is on the first page of the search results
• Attracts and engages more visitors (both candidates and clients)

In reality, your website needs to appear on page one of the search results as otherwise searchers will probably never even know you exist. After scanning the first results page, people tend to type in a new search term and start the process all over again. Hence, the primary reason for using SEO is to rank highly on the first page to make it easier for candidates to discover your site.

Google uses algorithms to match your site’s content to the relevance of the search term. To optimise your web pages, you need to focus on the following areas.

1.    Page title

Your page title (the blue-coloured text) is the first thing people see when they perform a search. If your page title matches a candidate’s query, your site will almost certainly appear in the results.

For instance, when a candidate types a search term such as “bookkeeper in New York”, Google will look for web page titles that match this phrase. If your page appears on page two or below, it is time for you to optimise it to match the search query.

2.    URL

Your URL is the green line of text that appears in the search results. Search engines such as Google use URLs to verify whether the search term is also included in the web address. If you ensure that this is the case, you will boost your site’s ranking.

3.    Keyword density

Another critical feature used by Google to match search terms to web content is keyword density. To improve your chances of ranking highly, make sure you include the potential search terms in your web title, URL and content.

4.    Build your links

Google often regards recruitment websites that include links from similar sites as having more authority. To improve the ranking of your posts, share them on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

You need to identify the websites that many of your potential audiences are visiting. Then, consider sharing your links with them to improve your SEO campaigns. However, don’t forget to include a call-to-action button in the posting. For instance, if you want to prompt users to visit your site, you could add phrases such as “Click now to know more”.

5.    Career Page

Your career page is an excellent tool for boosting your company brand. This makes it essential to optimise this page. Here are some tips that can help:

• Boost your employer brand by providing the benefits and perks of working for your organisation.
• Add an employee review section since many candidates read this section before applying.
• You can use your company’s mission statement to inspire candidates to apply
• Make the page attractive and engaging by adding images and videos to the text but don’t forget to make it mobile friendly.

Convince your audience to remain on your website

You can encourage clients and candidates to stay longer on your website by making their visit enjoyable. So, how can you tell whether people like your website? One way of doing this is to determine your website’s bounce rate. A high ratio may indicate that your site does not:

• Engage visitors well enough
• Provide sufficient or correct information
• Contain interesting content

However, bounce rates do not always provide an accurate picture. For instance, a visitor may find your page, visit a blog post, close it and then open another. Google may consider this to be a bounce. You can consult an SEO specialist to keep your bounce rate low.

Reduce your bounce rate by creating videos

Videos can significantly improve both your SEO and content marketing strategies. Articles and blogs will provide valuable information to your readers. However, videos and images can pique their interest even more and may also encourage them to stay longer on your site.

You can either make the videos yourself or hire a professional to do it for you. Whichever way you decide to go, make sure you optimise the videos so they stand out from the crowd.

Incorporate captions or subtitles

Google’s search bots cannot read images, which is why you need to include text. When writing a caption, make sure it is relevant enough to boost your video’s search ranking.

Subtitles will also allow your audience to watch the video in public areas without having to turn on the sound.

1.    Select the best videos possible

It is not a good idea to embed more than one video in a single post. Google often stops crawling pages for videos once they find the first. By implementing the following advice, you can improve the search ranking of your video:

• Ensure the length of the video and the loading speed are mobile-friendly
• Include relevant keywords in the caption, description and title
• Quality is essential; to entice clients and jobseekers, make sure the video has good lighting and clear sound

2.    Incorporate an appropriate thumbnail

Your audience will be able to discern what your video is about if you use a relevant thumbnail. This can also boost the video’s

• Search ranking
• Traffic generation
• Online visibility

Choose your thumbnail manually and make sure it reflects your video’s message.

3.    Post the video on your website and promote it

Whilst it is cheaper to post a video on YouTube, this may discourage your intended audience from visiting your website. To get the most out of your online recruitment marketing strategies, it is much better to host the video on your own website.

If your target audience watches the video and shares or follows it, they will also be sharing your website. This will in turn generate more traffic. One video per page is enough to make your site SEO-friendly.

If you post videos on YouTube, make sure you include a link to your web page in the description.

Don’t forget to promote your videos on social media platforms.

Takeaway

SEO is an indispensable tool in online recruitment. The most important website sections to optimise are the page titles and the URL. You should also build up your keyword density and links to improve your search ranking and online traffic. Providing an enjoyable user experience can also help persuade visitors to stay longer on your site. Furthermore, videos and images can make their visit both exciting and entertaining.

Want to learn more?

Did you know that in HR-ON Recruit you can publish your job ads to multiple media platforms?
This includes both digital and printed media, so you can manage all your exposure in one place and collect statistics on which platforms bring you the best candidates.