Job Advertising: How to Optimize It for More Exposure?

by Mark S Cooper

The goal is to hire better and faster, but is that really happening? Drafting a job requirement post can be a daunting experience considering how everyone wants the best talent available in the market with suitable qualifications and top-notch expertise.

Since the advent of SEO, job advertising has evolved. Now, it’s more of a necessity to create SEO optimized job postings if we want to reach out to a larger audience (which we very well do). Below, I have suggested 5 easy ways to do so.

Customize URLs

We have talked about adding keywords like location and title in your job postings. My suggestion is to customize your web address with the job title, location, and important keywords. It emphasizes the main keywords alongside making your URL search-friendly. Long domain names turn off the readers, so it’s best to limit it within 3-5 additional words after your domain name. If put-to-use correctly, that must be enough. Remove the extras or the joining words, like ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘an’.

Add engaging videos

You know what is common between search engines and web visitors, they both love videos. Stats say that viewers consume 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to the 10% of the text. Apart from that, videos also record several times higher click rates. Apart from driving traffic, when your post is backed up with a video, job seekers tend to spend more time on your page, increasing the time-on-page metric. This also helps job seekers and visitors learn more about your organization.

With the benefits of driving more qualified personnel, adding engaging videos also helps you improve your ranking on SERPs. You can also consider adding a transcript of the video on your website or job posting. It will further optimize your post.

Use landing pages

The job postings come and go and once the position is taken, the web page is removed. The reason why I strongly stand by the use of landing pages. You can list certain positions that are always open and available, or even for the ones which are hard to fill. The idea behind this step is to drive your target audience or job seekers to your careers page, even if you are not hiring. These landing pages can be optimized for SEO with different techniques like, including top keywords, so that they are easily found by web crawlers and job seekers.

Optimize job ads using keywords

SEO and keywords are forever-partners, one can’t survive without the other. Any job description, that is not keyword-rich, is most likely to be stuck within a circle of a limited audience. Job title followed by the name of the location, pretty much explains everything and thus MUST contain the centrifugal keywords of the relevant industry. These are the first things a job seeker will look for. To increase traffic, the job title should be generalized, to increase the odds for searches. But at the same time, it shouldn’t be so common that it puts you in the competition with millions of others.

The keywords you choose, should strike a balance with each other, and form a clear picture in the job seeker’s mind. There are several free tools available that help you recognize the keywords. For starters, you can check out the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This is a very good way to start optimizing your job posts and drive traffic from the beginning.

Optimize it for intelligent readers

It is highly likely that your post will first be read by robots considering the deployment of Artificial Intelligence for several reasons. Let me cite a few tactics to make it Intelligence friendly so that they share your job posting with the relevant audience –

First and foremost, beware of any grammatical or spelling errors in your post. Follow the golden rule of proofreading (Twice!). These silly errors confuse the AI. Next, avoid over-formatting, like all-caps or over usage of special characters. You surely can get creative with your posts. You can make use of powerful marketing words but the formatting is not AI friendly and hence its best kept to the minimum. Lastly, don’t forget the company profile. Job seekers want to know who their potential employers are, their beliefs, work ethics, and similar things. This gives AI another opportunity to help you connect with people with similar beliefs and reach out to a larger set of audience.

Gone are the days when job seekers went door-to-door dropping their CVs, the world has shifted to a screen and so must the recruiters and hiring managers. That doesn’t really imply you need to learn a new software with complex coding, a few tricks, and techniques with basic knowledge of internet will serve the purpose.