4 Search Engine Tips To Attract Top Talent

 In an age where jobs boards, social media and employee referrals remain the most popular ways to attract talent to your firm or agency, it’s easy to forget the role that search engines, and basically Google can have on your talent hunt. With there being over 360,000,000 long tail job-related searches (e.g. highly targeted searches such as java develop jobs in Birmingham) in a typical month on Google, it simply cannot be overlooked as a means of attracting qualified and extremely relevant and targeted talent.

But, how can firms and recruiters get a slice of this market? Certainly not by leaving it to chance but actually by developing the appropriate search engine optimized content to act like a magnet and draw top talent to your website. Of course, SEO is a gargantuan topic and we can’t expect to address it all here, and so we have focused on a few key areas to help employers and recruiters tap into the search engine based talent market.

1. Post regular and relevant job related content

After developing your careers page or agency site, you need to load it with relevant content that will attract relevant mid-and-long tail researchers to your website. The following are relevant types of content that you need to be loading on your pages:

• Job descriptions for all the roles you place regularly
• City/town guides for the locations where you place jobs or where your offices are based
• Lots of job-related content
• News
• Blog

2. Include a blog and update it regularly (multiple times per week)

Why? Blog posts are one of the fastest pieces of content to be indexed by Google with some studies showing that blog posts can be indexed by Google in seconds. Google favors sites that update their content regularly. And the best way to keep your site current is to host and maintain a highly targeted blog and update it on a regular basis.

3. Encourage plenty of comments on your blog/job adverts

A recent study by Ongig has shown that jobs ads with comments can have a much stronger SEO ranking than job ads without comments. In their example they showed how a comments section increased the number of search engine relevant words fourfold which increased the job ad’s ability to attract targeted job seekers dramatically. So, as well as posting your job, include a comments section and invite job seekers to ask questions and encourage HR and hiring managers to make relevant updates and comments regularly.

4. Create an employer branding video portal in addition to a text portal

YouTube is the third most trafficked site in the world, just behind Google and Facebook, and is the second largest search engine behind Google. So, if you think it’s right to target SEO towards Google, it’s also right to do it specifically for YouTube. YouTube can now step out of the shadows of Google and occupy its own position on the stage. And, as a result, employers and recruiters should now be producing video content that will increase their chances of being found by long-tail job searchers. In fact, one study suggests that job-related content containing video is 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of results. So, where possible, embed employer branding videos in job postings and in your careers content to search engine optimize your content in the Google text search — and also build your own employer branding video portal so you exploit the massive numbers of job candidates searching on YouTube.