There is a lot of confusion surrounding recruitment SEO and it could be easy for HR Professionals to assume that a corporate career website will never be able to beat the job boards and agency recruiters to high page rankings.
The truth is that a well optimised career website can be more attractive to Google than a job board, for the simple reason that a corporate career website publishes original content. The full Blog on Recruitment SEO: The facts for corporate recruiters, can be read here, but the following is an overview of how this has resulted in the new RWE npower career website, integrated with the Lumesse TalentLink ATS has increased its Google rankings.
Google loves original content and hates aggregated content
Earlier this year Google launched the first of the Panda algorithm changes. Each of these updates was designed to seek out quality content over aggregated content. This was achieved by reviewing websites from a human visitor’s perspective not a machine.
A lot of career websites bury this content deep in the site, without linking it together, or in the case of the vacancies on the ATS supplier’s domain, its not possible to do this dynamically. This means a visitor (and Google) has to search for the content, rather than having it ‘pushed’ to them, which makes life difficult for the visitor and Google doesn’t like that.
The new RWE npower Career Website
Consumer focussed e-commerce sites such as Amazon provided a model for the new RWE npower career website, focussing on an enhanced candidate experience. Controlling where a visitor lands and what content is displayed is critical to visitor engagement and the aim of engagement is to convert visitors into candidates by applying for a vacancy or joining the talent community.
Landing pages can be used to group content together, typically by job families and locations, which creates a hub of interest for visitors. By understanding what job seekers are searching for, these pages can be optimised to include relevant page titles, urls and specific keywords in the content.
The new RWE npower career website goes beyond vacancies with interlinked supporting pages of relevant content and is one of the reasons Google views it as a higher authority than many of the job boards.
Getting SEO Right: The Results
After 4 weeks:
- Over 800 pages indexed by Google (previous site 103, as no vacancies could be indexed)
- Vacancies ranking at number 1 in Google
- Achieving page 1 and 2 rankings for general job family searches
- Achieving first employer positioning for general job family searches
- Time on Site up by 30%
- Page views up by 35%
Read more about the RWE npower career website project in their case study here
If you’re interested in talking about what is possible for your own career website, please feel free to contact me on:
Tel: 020 7392 1711
Email: david.johnston@4MAT.com
