Discussions about Career Sites, SEO/SEM, Recruitment, Random Discoveries, Pop Culture
The more specific your terms the more capable we are of determining the job seeker’s intent. Matching the searcher’s intent is what allows you to successfully engage with the search engine job seeker. The job seeker looking for ‘nursing jobs’ has a less specific intent than the searcher looking for ‘nursing jobs salary’ and their informational goals could be quite different. The ‘nursing jobs’ job seeker could be interested in locating sites where they can find job opportunities, maybe a job board or an aggregation site where they can perform a search. They could just as easily be researching how many different types of nursing jobs exist for a school paper. Typically speaking, the fewer the terms a person searches with, the more vague their search intent — and the more competition there is to gain a first page listing on a search engine for these high traffic terms.
We can place the keywords an active job seeker uses into four different categories, each with distinct traffic volumes and specificity of intent:
Core Search terms can also be considered job browsing terms — they are the highest level, least specific job search related terms for a particular area of work such as nursing jobs or nursing careers. These are search phrases which see very high volumes of activity but there is a distinct order of job seeker preference which echoes across different groups of job seekers. In fact, according to Google’s search volume reports, just adding one simple letter to one word can increase the search activity on a core search term phrase by over 100,000 searches per month or more. What letter could wield such power? The letter ‘s’. Job seekers typically seem to favor the plural form of the words job and career. The terms jobs and careers consistently generate more searches than their singular forms: job and career. In some cases these increases can be as high as 1258% to 2400%.
Typical core search terms include the following (the term ‘nursing’ is used as a job field indicator for example purposes): nursing jobs, nursing careers, nursing employment, nursing job and nursing career. The search volumes for these phrases is typically quite high, especially for phrases containing ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’ and typically the organic, non-paid, search results for these terms are dominated by job boards. Arguably, at this phase of the job search experience the active job seeker using these search phrases is looking for job search resources although if the right job opportunity or company were to appear in these listings, it would definitely receive traffic.
Position/Job Title Terms could be considered ‘strong active’ job seeker searches. These are searches specific to a particular position or job skill. For the core search term ‘nursing jobs’ a related position search phrase would be ‘registered nurse jobs’ or ‘nursing assistant jobs’. From a search volume perspective, it is not uncommon for more than half of the top 20 search related terms about a particular field to consist of these position specific terms. Again, depending on the job family niche these volumes can be quite high (i.e.: sales manager jobs with ~74K average searches per month) or noticeably lower (i.e.: accounting sales jobs with ~210 average searches per month). However, like the core search terms mentioned above, these search results pages are often dominated by both the general audience and niche audience job boards. Again, the seeker looking in this area is probably looking for job search resources but would welcome the appearance of a familiar company name in their area.
Location terms are even more specific variations of the previous search phrases. Why look for nursing jobs everywhere when you know you really want a nursing job in the greater Boston area? Depending on the job field these monthly job search volumes tend to be in the thousands for state-related searches, in the hundreds for city-related searches, and for some locations the search volume is so low that Google will simply report ‘not enough data’. Who is your competition here? It’s not your candidate-space competitor across town who’s looking for the same talent you are. Yet again these search results tend to be dominated by general and niche job boards. However, depending on the job niche and the city, it is not uncommon to see the occasional business show up in this type of search result.
There are syntactical variations to all of the above searches: people looking for ‘jobs in sales’, ‘nursing job finder’, ‘engineering vacancies’, ‘nurse job opening’ and the like. Some of these can even generate a fair amount of traffic but typically, as seen with the rest of the types of searches performed, the search listing competition is dominated by job board sites.
Finally, there are long-tail search phrases. Long tail phrases are typically very specific job search related phrases like ‘sales jobs in fort lauderdale fl’ or ‘nursing jobs boston area.’ These search phrases typically see much less traffic than the more general search phrases mentioned above. And, although the competition for these phrases can be much less fierce than that seen for the other types of job seekers searches, it is still no cake-walk to get a first page listing for these phrases. The strength of the job boards in the other search areas still lends to them appearing in search results for these phrases. The key question that long-tail job search raises is: how much is a search phrase which may only bring in one click a month really worth? On it’s own, not much. This is why typical job search SEO long-tail strategies focus on hundreds, if not thousands of long-tail search terms. Variation after variation of ‘job name city’, ‘job name city state’, etc.
The goal of long-tail search phrases is to attract visitors who have signaled very specific intent through phrases which get typically get very low volumes of search on a monthly or quarterly basis. The intent of these long-tail visitors is typically more ‘serious’ than your ‘browsing’ job seeker using a search engine. These are visitors whose intent, when matched with the appropriate information on your ‘landing page’ (the page they arrive at after clicking your link) are more likely to convert…either as an applicant or by joining a talent network, subscribing to an RSS feed, etc. The value of the actual volume and leads generated through these long-tail methods in search engines (not job search aggregation sites) needs to be carefully balanced against the cost of implementation and how the execution fits into your entire online recruitment strategy.
Why job boards are your search engine competitors.
When it comes to search listings, the search engines look to two primary items to determine if a page should be listed high in search results: content and confirmation. Yes, Google’s ranking algorithm is complex and yes there is more to it than JUST these two items, but these two represent the heart and soul of search. Google and the other search engines want to know what the page is about and the more closely the page’s content relates to the specific search term being used by someone, the more likely that page is to be listed. However it isn’t enough for your page to contain content about a subject or to be ‘optimized’ for a specific search phrase. The search engines want confirmation that your page REALLY IS about that topic, and even more importantly that it contains worthwhile content about the subject. To get that confirmation they look for links, links inside your site that point to that page and links from other sites that point to your page. The more links you have from credible online sources, the more certain the search engines are that your page is related to the search phrase. Optimizing for the exact search phrase is crucial, and subtle: under-represent the phrase in your strategy and you will get ignored, use it too aggressively and you risk being penalized for ‘over optimization.’
The job boards have plenty of what Google loves: Content and Confirmation. This translates into millions of page of content capable of linking to each other with keywords specifically created to align with the four job search patterns: core, position/job title, location and long-tail hybrid search phrases. They have strong networks of links pointing to them, reaffirming that the content of their pages is topical and relevant. Oftentimes, they are your search engine competition, not the company who is out recruiting the same talent as you.
So how do you get your career messaging and opportunities seen by search engine job seekers? How do you compete with the job board juggernauts? In part 2 of this post we will look at some solutions to this dilemma and your secret weapon for candidate engagement. In the meantime, please share your search engine optimization experiences.
With 14 years of experience in Internet Development and Strategic Marketing Consulting, I approach solutions from both a strategic and technical perspective to produce online solutions and strategies ranging from Social Network Marketing, SEO/SEM, Site Development, Mobile Marketing and more with end-to-end metrics tracking performance. I live to chew up problems and spit out solutions. Oh, and I brew beer. Really good beer. 
