I don’t talk much about search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) because: a) I’m not an expert; and b) many oth­er folks are experts. But…I do have opin­ions and advice! So this will be my ‘take the Doc­tor’s com­ments with a grain of salt’ dis­cus­sion about job board SEO. (For more on job board SEO, check out the Job­Board­Geek pod­cast that focused on the sub­ject, here).

First of all: should you care about SEO? Well…yes! Absolute­ly!! Opti­miz­ing your job board so that can­di­dates can find it is crit­i­cal for your long term suc­cess and prof­itabil­i­ty. If your site is opti­mized, then the right can­di­dates can find it and con­nect with employ­ers. If you’re not opti­mized, you’re more like the prover­bial ‘shoe store in an emp­ty field’ – sure, you’re open for busi­ness, but you will be wait­ing a long time for cus­tomers!

So what are the basics that no one – not even the Doc­tor – should ignore?

A) Look like a job board: No, Google and Bing do not visu­al­ly inspect your site – but job seek­ers do. If they don’t rec­og­nize your site as one that they can use to find jobs, they will click past it. Google, etc. will rec­og­nize that every job seek­er seems to click past your site – and they will deduce that you are not a job board. Is that going to help your SEO? Um….no. So make sure you have those lit­tle hints like: a job search box; job list­ings; text that says ‘the Doc­tor’s guide to job board careers’ (or some­thing like that!); and oth­er key terms like ‘resume’, ‘job search’, ‘careers’, and so on. Don’t get too cute with your terms – you’ll just con­fuse both the job seek­ers AND the search engines.

B) Fol­low Google for Jobs schema: Many years ago, Google devel­oped a job post schema – basi­cal­ly a guide to the infor­ma­tion that a job post should con­tain in order for Google to index it. If you’re unfa­mil­iar with it, check out the details here. The schema includes key infor­ma­tion about the job that Google believes job seek­ers want, such as salary, loca­tion, employ­er, and so on. If you for­mat your job board­’s posts using the schema, Google is more like­ly to include them in its own job results index – this is gen­er­at­ed when a job seek­er goes on Google and types some­thing like, ‘mar­ket­ing jobs near me’. Google’s ‘blue box’ dis­plays the jobs, along with links to apply – includ­ing links to your job board. In oth­er words, you can now get addi­tion­al traf­fic that in pre­vi­ous times had been reserved pri­mar­i­ly for those sites that were extreme­ly SEO-opti­mized (like, um, Indeed). Trust me – for 99% of us, this is a good thing. So do it.

C) Use a job board soft­ware plat­form that does SEO well: Par­tic­u­lar­ly if you’re a start-up or even estab­lished site, if you’re not ‘grow­ing your own’ plat­form – be sure to use a job board soft­ware plat­form that under­stands and opti­mizes for SEO! How do you know if they are such a plat­form? Well…check to see if they auto­mat­i­cal­ly for­mat jobs for the Google Jobs schema. Check out their page struc­ture. Check the SEO vis­i­bil­i­ty of some of their cus­tomers. Ask them how they keep their soft­ware up to date with regard to SEO. Just like every­thing else, some ven­dors do bet­ter on this than oth­ers.

Well…I said it was short! SEO is a com­pli­cat­ed sub­ject – wit­ness how many SEO com­pa­nies there are out there. At some point it is a good idea to talk to an SEO expert, not only to improve on what you’re done thus far, but to iden­ti­fy the changes you should plan for in the future. Good SEO will pos­i­tive­ly impact every­thing else you do to attract can­di­dates and employ­ers. So invest­ing in it is smart.

Enough said.

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[Check out Job­Board­Geek, the Doc­tor’s pod­cast!)

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