4 Reasons Why SEO is Important to Your Job Site

Search engine optimization, or SEO, has become an important buzzword in today’s tech-driven world. When it comes to your careers page or job listings, SEO is vital to reaching your target audience. Did you know that 80 percent of job seekers start their job hunt on a search engine, not a job board? Proper search engine optimization is essential for your job listings to capture relevant job seeker traffic.

It drives traffic to your listings. When people are searching for “your industry + jobs” they will easily be able to find your page if it’s properly search engine optimized. In fact, many young professionals will look for jobs on a company’s site before they look elsewhere.

It helps you reach your target audience. All this traffic you’re bringing to your site is hopefully the people who will apply for your job openings. If your page has the right optimization, you will able to reach your target audience better than using other means of promotion.

You won’t need to rely on a job board. Sure, job boards drive some traffic to your listing because many people still look there to find job openings. The problem with job boards is that you often end up with unqualified applicants applying for your opening. Basically, job boards tend to cost a lot while yielding few quality results.

Your page will be closer to the top of the results. Job board ads aren’t usually indexed by major search engines, like Google. That means if your candidate is typing in keywords, but your job opening is on a major job board, they likely won’t see it in the first few pages of results. If you optimize your website for search engines, you can get in the top results to be found first.

Is your careers page or recruitment site optimized for search engines? If it is, how has it helped drive traffic to your site?

Author:

Heather R. Huhman is the Career & Recruiting Advisor for Cachinko. She is also the founder & president of career and workplace education and consulting firm Come Recommended, author of #ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle (2010), national entry-level careers columnist for Examiner.com, and blogs about career advice at HeatherHuhman.com.