You want to reach your target candidates so they engage with your employer story. Good content can help you do this and enhance your employer brand, particularly if it’s SEO friendly. You might be thinking this is something that only so-called SEO experts can help with. Not so. The good news is that you, the busy recruiter, can become your own SEO superstar. And that’s a great skill to have.
SEO – or ‘search engine optimisation’ to give its full name isn’t rocket science – but there are a few tactics you’ll need to know. We’ve shared our top tips and ideas to give your very own articles, blogs and other content an SEO friendly boost.
1: Write good content and tell compelling stories
The first rule of good SEO is to produce content that people will want to read and share with others. That’s how you really boost content reach. If it fails on this count, it’ll fail no matter what else you do. So, have a plan for who your readers are and what you want them to know. If you are writing about a particular topic or area within your business, what makes it interesting? How do you do it differently? How does it align with your values? What would a candidate find really interesting?
Asking the right questions will help you discover much of this. And it just so happens that we’ve created a guide on how to do this. It’ll help you capture the authentic voices that reflect the vibrant spirit of your business – just what you need to create really great content. So check out ‘Blog-writing – how to turn a great conversation into a remarkable story’.
2: Research relevant keywords
This is where you need to put yourself in your reader’s shoes. Good SEO is all about making sure your readers and candidates are able to find what they’re looking for. So, what words would help them find your content? What terms, acronyms etc. would that be? This will give you the keywords to use in your text and also in the SEO plugin on your site – more of that later.
There’s no shortage of tools purpose-built for keyword research and some are more complex than others. The Moz Keyword Explorer is one of the best all-around free SEO keyword research tools. Simply enter your term and the country in which you are based. You’ll get a handy list of keywords – and short phrase suggestions. And you’ll be able to see whether they are popular or not. But don’t be too put off if a very specific keyword has a low ranking. If they are niche terms your intended audience will be looking for, then you’ll still need to use them.
3: Structure your story – and remember WIFM
WIFM? What’s in it for me. It’s what any reader wants to know. If they can’t see what you are trying to say or find the value, they won’t give you five minutes of their valuable time. So, don’t make it hard – tell them what you are going to tell them. Start with an introduction (your topic and what they’ll learn), move onto the body of the article (where you’ll cover the main points) and end with a conclusion (the main point you want them to remember). Then, create a ‘call to action’ (what you want them to do or go to next).
4: Think layout – paragraphs, subheadings and visuals
Your ideal blog length might be 600-800 words. That’s a lot of text. It’s important to break this up but in a way that makes sense and helps both the reader and your SEO. It’s a good idea to mention the main keywords in the opening paragraph but not excessively so. And paragraphs work well when they have their own topic or theme. Clear subheadings help your reader to work out the structure and perhaps where to head to if they are skimming for relevance. In a recruitment / employer brand context you might talk about your culture and values, types of roles in a function, the benefits on offer and maybe links to other information which could be a video or perhaps how to apply.
And why not add a visual – this will certainly help the content to display with more interest when you link to it from LinkedIn for example. Content with visuals receive vastly more views. From an SEO perspective, Google doesn’t just search for keywords in text, it also searches for how image files are saved and titled. If your post uses an image and you’ve called it ‘Image1’ when you load it to your site, that won’t mean anything or help your SEO, but ‘Women in IT image – Data Science Jobs – (Company Name) Careers’ will.
5: Link to other internal content
You’ve probably already produced other related content. Don’t forget to link to it from within the new article, like we did in the first section above. It helps readers find other things of interest, it keeps them to stay on your site for longer and it helps SEO. Google likes it because it helps them manage your content and understand relationships between different content on your site. What’s more, it will make your new and existing content stronger, because you show your authority on the subject. For example, if you are reading this article about creating SEO friendly employer branding content, you might also be interested in our related article ‘How to improve the SEO of your careers website.’ So, we’ve included a handy internal link for you to find it. Now, isn’t that user friendly and helpful? Oh, and we also mentioned the article’s main keyword phrase again too.
6: Keep publishing new content – it’s good for your SEO
There’s no doubt you have plenty going on in your business. New projects, new people joining, important work being done in your sector and of course new roles being created. You probably have more to cover in new content than you think. Adding fresh content helps your SEO as it tells Google that your website is alive and well. If you stop or slow down your rate of publishing, Google will crawl your site less often and that will have a detrimental effect on your careers site ranking.
But please don’t compromise on quality just to keep adding content. It all has to capture the real essence and personality of your business and your people. Yes, AI is a tempting option, but it can only use the information it pulls from the web. It might be able to write about a certain type of role, but it can’t capture the human stories that create your culture. This point takes us full circle back to where we started. Good SEO depends on content that people will want to read and share with others.
For more guidance on what goes into creating good content and how to promote it, please read our article ‘Content marketing for recruiters. Engaging candidates with your employer brand.’
7: Use your SEO plugin
Every website, whatever the platform it’s built on will almost certainly have some form of SEO module or plugin. For example, in WordPress sites this is often called Yoast. They cover a number of aspects of good SEO. They can check your content to make sure your chosen keyword is optimised and used in the right places. They also check on related key phrases and the quality of the readability of your text. The SEO plugin will also enable you to set up your content to display properly when shared in social media and ensures an image is loaded which will create visual interest. It’s really worth investing a little time to get this right, you’ve worked hard on producing great content so give it the SEO juice to help it fly.
Conclusion
While there are a number of things you should do to maximise the SEO of your content, most of them are manageable and shouldn’t put you off managing your own careers site SEO. However, the best rule of SEO is to invest the time and resources to create the kind of content that your audience will want to read and engage with. That’s what will lead to more links, shares via LinkedIn and returning visitors to your website.
Need a little help?
We hope this article on careers content SEO has been helpful. If you feel that you’d like some help, support or even a little chat around this or any aspect of your employer brand and talent attraction strategy just drop us a line. After all, much of our best work has started with a cup of tea and a Zoom call.
