Are you using SEO to your advantage when writing your recruitment advertisements? You should! Here’s why.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) may be a key concern for your marketing team, but what about HR? The ultimate goal for any organisation’s marketing strategy is to rank on the Google’s page one for their keywords. Imagine how many more applications you’d receive if your recruitment advertisement organically hit the top of a job board, careers page or Google’s first page when a potential candidate searches for a role.

For example, image you’re hiring for a Marketing Manager for your business based in North Brisbane. The perfect candidate may be searching for a role and in this location just like this on Seek. Your advertisement appears on Seek’s first page and immediately grabs their attention. They click the link through, read more about your organisation on your website, then submit an application.

What a great result.

In today’s candidate-driven market, if you organisation can easily be found by active candidates searching for roles, you’re already one step ahead of the competition.

How does SEO help you to successfully reach the best talent?

Job seekers will be able to see your vacancies by simply searching for a role or a keyword on Google or job boards. If you want to master SEO for this purpose, you’ll need to utilise Google and job boards. The Goliaths of the recruitment world most likely pay for their advertisements to be seen first, but if you rank organically, you’ve gained a competitive advantage and saved time and money.

Job board algorithms are very similar to Google, so approach writing your recruitment advertisement with SEO in the same way you would for Google optimisation. Google ranks pages that it considers to be valuable based on particular key points. See a few tips below to help you optimise your job advert and to improve organic ranking on both Google and job boards.

Here are 3 SEO tips to help you get the most out of your recruitment advertisement. 

1. Keywords, keywords, keywords

Similar to writing a webpage, when writing your advertisement for SEO you need to think about the keywords. The main keywords to consider in this case are the job title, location and popular work benefits (such as ‘flexible working’).

Keep these keywords as accurate and relevant as possible. So, for the example above, your keywords would be: ‘Marketing Manager’ and ‘North Brisbane’.

Try researching similar roles too to understand the type of content your competitors are writing that enables their advertisements to rank. You will typically be able discern organically high-ranking advertisements, as the webpage title, meta-description, URL slug are usually in the first few lines of text.

Bonus Tip: Once you have identified what keywords you’ll need to include in your copy, use a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner to help with optimisation.

2. Write accurately and clearly

This is really important. Keywords are going to help you rank, but search engines and job board algorithms are clever and read your content to ensure it is relevant to the keywords. It’s important not to over-kill it on the keyword front — a choice of a couple are perfect.

Write your recruitment advertisement as you usually would. Afterwards, incorporate those keywords and write an accurate job description with your ideal candidate in mind. The algorithms will like your copy if it is clear, explanatory and precise. If it’s too vague, all the keyword research will go down the drain!

3. Increase traffic, reduce bounce rate

The algorithms are clever; they rank based on usefulness as well as relevance. Traffic heading to your page with a low bounce rate is a big tick, as it shows your page to be useful and should, therefore, cause it to rank better.

How do you achieve this?

• Ensure your advertisement is as accessible to those who are viewing it on their smartphones and tablets as it is for desktop. The ability to view and read your advertisement on a mobile device is going to reduce the bounce rate
• Optimise your advertisement for sharing. By ensuring your link is optimised for your organisation (and potential candidates) to share on LinkedIn and other social media platforms, you’ll be able to drive more traffic to the page
• Consider placing links within your advertisement. For example, include a link to your organisations ‘About Us’ page on your website and social media pages. If candidates are able to interact with your webpage, Google and the job boards will rank it more highly.

Need some help optimising your recruitment advertisement for search engines? Call us on 07 3330 2595 or email info@scouttalent.com.au.