Career site SEO - ignore it at your peril

I have read a few posts recently and heard a few ad agencies suggest to clients that SEO is not something to worry about.  Maybe if you are Rupert Murdoch you can take that view but for a corporate career site to block search engines is crazy, crazy stupid.

For the last 5 years we have been tracking a number of corporate career sites and have seen the employer name e.g. "jobs at X", "working for Y" etc being in anywhere from 50% - 80% of searches that drive traffic to the career site. 

Furthermore, Google have recently released their own findings that show since March direct employer job queries have pulled away with 33% greater growth than branded queries for service providers such as Monster, Totaljobs etc. Yet more reason why a big brand such as Tesco can seriously think about monetising their content.

Also, and again confirmed by Google, longer search phrases with 4 word phrases e.g. "store manager nottingham fashion" are growing faster than shorter phrases e.g. "store manager".  This not only makes it easier to optimise your career site to perform better in rankings but also CPC costs are a lot lower for longer phrases.  For example, to sponsor "jobs" or "IT jobs" is expensive and in reality not where an employer wants to be anyway but, sponsoring "retail manager fashion" is a lot cheaper and more focused.

We have seen search traffic drive significant volumes to career sites but of course in many cases the jobs are hidden in the ATS.  Again, by having better job titles to reflect search trends and making sure your jobs CAN be indexed by search engines, and a few well selected job aggregators, you will be able to see much better results at a significantly lower cost.  Of course you need to be measuring what is going on but I assume to know and already do this.

We cover SEO in more detail in the Corporate Recruiters Handbook which you can get for free at www.hirestrategies.co.uk/handbook.