​Three easy ways SEO can increase candidate traffic to your website

Moz defines Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results”. As recruitment marketers working within the talent space, that is exactly what we’re looking to accomplish – an increase in the quantity and quality of applicants coming to our website.
 
Let's pause and do a quick test. Open Google and type in any of the open roles you have + jobs, an example being, “mechanical engineer jobs”. Does your company come up as a top result? What if you add a location “mechanical engineer jobs NYC” …Anything?
 
Unless candidates are including your company name in their searches, they are going to have a very hard time finding you through search. By not showing up in those results, you and your organization are missing out on all those candidates. The good news is, you can help fix that with SEO. While a proper SEO strategy may require time, resources and back-end website work, here are three quick tips you can start with to help make a difference:

1. Blogs  
Blogs are a great resource for talent teams. They give you an opportunity to provide answers to questions your potential candidates are searching for and share more details about your organization’s culture. For example, someone may search: “What companies in NYC offer relocation assistance?”. If you work for Company X and Company X offers great relocation resources, this would be a great topic for you to blog about! By doing a bit of research (even using Google auto-complete) you can create a list of questions job seekers are asking, then create blog posts that directly answer those questions! When creating content for your blog you should always refer back to The Content Marketing Honeycomb and make sure whatever you are writing ticks off at least 3 areas of value.

2.  Job Descriptions  
The job descriptions on your career site are a great resource for you when it comes to improving website traffic. With Google’s enhanced jobs search results, its important to make sure that your jobs are showing up in those results. Check out our other post for more SEO tips on improving your job descriptions for Google.

​3. Backlinks
You may have noticed them throughout this post, but what are backlinks? Backlinks are when a webpage links to another page. Backlinks are essential to SEO and will help drive traffic to your site. While it’s easy to add back links to your own content, it takes a bit of work to have someone back link to your content. Here is how you can start receiving backlinks:

• Create content worth linking to. Interview tips, benefits overviews, leadership interviews all hold value.
• Build relationships with some of your media partners. Do they have a blog series or podcast you can participate in?

 
While a good portion of SEO relies on technical optimization, you can apply these tips to help you get ahead. And remember, great content provides real value to your candidates!

Sarah Green
​Account Director