Nigel Muir, managing director of search engine marketing specialist DBD Media, has provided five top tips for recruitment search success to get your position noticed.

 
1. Take the time to understand and evaluate whether pay-per-click advertising or search engine optimisation (SEO) is right for you. High-ranking SEO results are often more trusted by users, but can take months to appear. PPC campaigns are instant and highly measurable, and you can quickly see results. To attract the maximum number of applications, integrate both.
 
2. Search is a user-generated medium, so ensure that your keywords are terms candidates are actually searching for – such as job titles and locations – rather than the terms you guess they are using. Research using an agency or some of the free keyword tools will quickly tell you which keywords have high volumes of searches.
 
3. Don’t forget to include negative search terms to refine the relevancy of your PPC campaign. This saves costs by controlling which user searches your ads appear against, and ensuring that they only target the most relevant searches.
 
4. In most sectors, including recruitment, certain keywords are extremely popular and fiercely competed over e.g. ‘accountancy jobs’.  They are therefore too expensive for many recruitment consultancies, jobs boards or recruiters to bid on.
 
The solution to this is two-fold:
 

• Bid on derivatives of the keywords that may be cheaper such as ‘junior accountancy jobs’, ‘finance controller jobs’ or ‘accountancy jobs in Brighton’. These derivatives are more specific and therefore more targeted, and the cost to gain first page visibility will be lower.

• Make sure that the pages relating to these keywords are optimised from a natural search perspective.  Google and the other search engines rank website pages by their relevance – so if you would like your website to rank for ‘accountancy jobs in Brighton’ make sure that there is textual content on a specific page of your website that refers to accountancy jobs in Brighton, and that the page title and header tags also use these keywords. 

 
If you get this right your page will start to achieve higher positions in the natural search results for these keywords, reducing your reliance on the PPC ads. For keywords that already convert well through PPC we would advise a similar approach, as increased natural rankings means that you can reduce reliance on PPC and cut some of your PPC costs.

5. Even after all these steps have been taken, your search investment will be wasted if candidates can’t find what they need when they reach your website. Make sure that the links from search engine results go to a page that is relevant to the search query. So, for example, if the search is for ‘accountancy jobs in Brighton’ make sure that the user lands on a page featuring these jobs, rather than your home page.
 
Search is a powerful but complex acquisition tool that requires expert understanding for maximum returns. Recruiters looking to gain a real edge and ensure that their vacancies stand out in the crowded market should ensure that they partner with a specialist to ensure that the best candidate for the job can find them.
 
Nigel Muir is managing director at DBD Media