Search Engine Optimization for Employer Careers Sites

Expand your Applicant Pool through Search Engine Optimization for Next to Nothing

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Let’s start off with a short explanation of the different types of search engine marketing. Go to google.com, or your favorite search engine, and run a search. You will see that most search engines have 3 main sections that appear on the search results page:

• Sponsored Listings ‒ These listings normally appear at the top of the results or on a narrow right side bar. They are short text based listings, and you pay for each person who clicks on your ad and visits your site. If you would like to learn more about how to advertise your jobs with sponsored listings, visit our pay-per-click marketing page.
• Banner Advertising ‒ Some search engines, not google.com, have graphics or banner spots on their pages. These banners are paid for based on the number of times it is viewed, with no guarantee that anyone will actually click on the ad and visit your site. We don’t usually recommend this type of advertising, unless it is highly targeted and carefully tracked to ensure you are not wasting you money, so it won’t be covered further.
• Organic Listings ‒ These listings usually appear in the middle of the page, or in the largest area on the page. On google.com these listings appear on the left side of the page, below the colored sponsored listings. These listings appear based on the relevance of the web page to the keyword phrase searched for. You CANNOT pay the major search engines to appear in or increase your ranking in the organic listings. In order to get your web page listing to appear on this page, or to rank higher, you use something called search engine optimization.

Increase your rankings in the organic listings!

Why Should Employers Use Search Engine Optimization?

It’s FREE! ‒ Since you can’t pay the search engines to appear or increase your rankings in the organic listings, it means that if you do rank well and generate applicants from your listings, those applicants are generated for FREE. Search engine optimization is one of the most cost effective and least understood ways to generate applicants for your company’s job openings.

Active Job Seekers are looking for jobs on search engines! ‒ More and more job seekers are going to the search engines to look for jobs and to research employers. A look at the searches for the top job keywords shows you x million searches were performed during the last month. The power of the search is that we can actually research the specific searches being performed targeting specific jobs in specific geographical area. Most of what they find when they run these searches are job boards. Those job boards bring them into their sites to view your job that you paid to post on the job board.

Passive Job Seekers are researching information and companies ‒ Your company and jobs will appear on searches about topics as well as jobs searches. You can even collect the names and interests of job seekers so that you can contact them about job openings in the future.

It provides a long term, consistent flow of applicants ‒ Much like your company website provides 24/7 access to information about your company and products/services to your prospects and customers, a well built careers site puts your company’s careers site out on the web for active and passive applicants to find even when you don’t have current openings.. Over time you will generate more and more consistent traffic to your careers site.

Why don’t employers use Search Engine Optimization?

Unfortunately, search engine optimization is one of the most cost effective and least understood ways to generate applicants for your company’s job openings. First off, even most marketing departments don’t truly understand how to market their company’s website via the organic listings on a search engine, so how would you expect HR departments to understand. Next, there is no published rule book on how to do it. Finally, since the search engines don’t make money from organic search rankings, and since they are trying to keep people from spamming the system, they do not publish how results are ranked or chosen. The good part is that those who do use search engine optimization will stand out to the job seekers. Because of these obstacles most employers, especially smaller employers, don’t even try to use this form of recruiting. Instead they post their jobs to job boards, and hope that the job boards generate traffic from the search engines.

How To Use Search Engine Optimization for Recruiting

Most likely you do not have the knowledge, or the time needed to learn how, to do search engine optimization. Your options are therefore to either hire a consultant, leave the SEO up to the job boards, or find a system that will do it for you. iApplicants was designed to allow anyone, regardless of your knowledge or experience, to effectively market their company and jobs via search engines.

How iApplicants Helps with Search Engine Optimization for Employer Careers Sites

NO IT/PROGRAMMING HELP OR KNOWLEDGE REQUIRED!! ‒ iApplicants will handle all of the graphics, setup, hosting, and programming of your careers site for you. The setup and ongoing use of iApplicants by your HR department will require NO work or support from your own IT staff! Honestly, you don’t even need to tell them about it except to ask them to change the careers link on your company website. It will take less than 30 minutes of time from the HR department to provide us the information to setup your site and customize it for your company. To learn more about our setup process, click here!

Optimized Careers Website and Job Listings ‒ iApplicants will provide you with a branded careers website for your company. It will include custom content pages for you to provide information about your company to job seekers. Your system allows HR to post and manage all of your job openings, and allows applicants to fill out your hiring application online. Your systems comes with the majority of SEO work already done for you. All that you have to do is follow our simple instructions to maximize your search engine targeting. To learn more about our careers site features, click here!

.Jobs Domain Names (additional fees apply) ‒ Add additional search engine power to your iApplicants site by moving it from a subdomain of iApplicants (ie http://yourcompany.applicantpro.com) to a .jobs domain (http://www.yourcompany.jobs). This upgrade not only increases your search engine rankings, but also makes it easier for applicants to access your careers site from your other marketing efforts. To learn more about .jobs domains, click here!

Tracking the Success ‒ iApplicants allows you to not only generate more applicants through the search engines, but also provides detailed reports about how many visitors are generated and the conversion of those visitors to applicants. Similar reporting is provided for all of your recruiting sources, providing you valuable information about the return on your recruiting dollar, and the ability make changes and track improvement in your efforts. To learn more about iApplicant reporting capabilities, click here!

Tips and Tricks ‒ iApplicants powered by ApplicantPro provides easy to follow instructions and tips on how to choose the keywords to target and how to improve your rankings on those keywords. No programming experience required, we will provide you with simple steps to follow that anyone can do.

How Much Will It Cost Me?

Every iApplicants careers site comes with our search engine optimization tools FREE! The only additional cost to iApplicants clients will be to upgrade the careers site to run on a .jobs domain instead of on a subdomain of iApplicants (such as http://yourcompany.iapplicants.com). If you would like to upgrade to a .jobs domain the cost will be just $299 per year. This includes the $149 annual domain registration fee charged to us by the domain registrar.

Learn More about iApplicants

Click on one of the links below to learn more about iApplicants:

• Watch our iApplicants Demo Presentation
• Register for one of our Applicant Tracking Webinars
• Signup for a FREE 30-day Trial
• Schedule a live iApplicants Demo
• Request a Price Quote

We have our own Careers Website, can iApplicants help me Optimize for the Search Engines?

We know that our hiring system may not be the best solution for all employers. If you already have a careers site and hiring system, we can still help you improve its rankings in the search engines. iApplicants offers a FREE search engine optimization for employer careers sites. This review will provided you with a comprehensive report on all the good and the bad of your current careers site, and provide specific ideas of how you could improve your rankings. To get started, click here and complete our careers site review form.