There are two goals to be met when trying to roll out a successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign. Make sure your company has considered the following when looking at HR SEO Goals1%

1. Increase the number of highly qualified and targeted job seekers to your corporate career website.

2. Increase an employer’s brand, through obtaining high search engine rankings for pages that contain content related to the keyword strings that job seekers are using to search for jobs.

As you have seen, more companies every day are jumping into the HR SEO Goals2% field. Most of these vendors are selling the same product or service, something along the lines of “we will pull your jobs from your ATS, create a micro-site that optimizes those jobs, and then send the candidates to your ATS”.

While this approach does create optimized job pages for Google to find, the problem is that the neither of the two primary goals of the SEO campaign are met. There is nothing about building an SEO-optimized page that will lead to more job seekers applying for your jobs. No job seekers will find these pages- it’s not enough just to structure a page so that Google can see it, you have to actively get other sites to point to yours, as well- so no brand authority will be achieved.

Let’s look at why.

It’s crucial that your pages are optimized for keyword phrases that job seekers are actually going to use. For example, if no one is searching for the phrase “c++ programmers java Irvine California 90k plus”- and they aren’t- it makes no difference how much time or money you spend promoting that page. If no one is using the keyword phrase you are optimizing the page for to search for jobs, they aren’t going to find your jobs and they certainly aren’t going to apply for them. When was the last time you searched Google and went to Page 2 of the results? Chances are, not very often. In fact, some results show that this happens less than 10% of the time. Top 10 and Top 20 rankings are all that really matter. In fact, when optimizing for any “search string” that has 4 or more words in it, page 2 doesn’t even matter, because there are so few people searching on these phrases, (i.e. “search traffic”), that 10% of 100 searches in a month is only 10 people… That is NOT going to drive candidates to your website.

So is there anything out there that does work?

First, you need to perform keyword research. This entails researching a list of potential keyword search strings, and developing a list of “keyword phrases” that your job seeker target audience is currently using to find your job openings. Only after you have done this research can you work on creating a “landing page” for your jobs, specifically designed to rank in the top 10 results for the specific phrase you choose. I want to stress that one more time- the key to SEO is knowing what your job seekers are typing in to Google. Only after you know that can you know what phrases you need to design your pages around. After your page has been optimized, typically, an SEO vendor will help to “submit” and promote the page with Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.

This doesn’t take a lot of work.

That, however, is not your stopping point. The steps outlined above will most likely get you indexed by Google, but not on page one. If it’s a competitive phrase, you’re not going to be on page 1, 2, 4, or 4, either. The final step of the SEO process is also the most time consuming, difficult and expensive process. However, without the proper marketing, your landing pages and career site are identical to everyone else’s. You must get references from other high-quality and well-thought-of websites to be seen as the authority.

To close, remember, there are 3 vital steps for successful SEO.

1. Doing keyword research to determine what will build your brand and drive traffic.

2. Implement a web page optimized for each particular keyword string.

3. Implementing a landing page marketing strategy to build credibility and authority to these new web pages.

Any HR SEO Goals#% strategy that doesn’t consider all 3 of these aspects is bound to fail, and that failure is measurable- if you’re not driving additional traffic to your career site, then the campaign isn’t working.

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