Recruitment is a very competitive business sector on the search engines and it is important that you create high-quality original content for your job site.
If you operate in mainstream recruiting across different business sectors, this is going to be particularly challenging because you will find yourself competing online with the world's leading job sites, such as Indeed.com, Jobs.net, Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Beyond.com, SimplyHired.com etc. These multinational giants of the employment world can often occupy the first 2 or 3 pages of the search engine results, making it extremely difficult for smaller recruitment firms to attract new employers and job-seekers on the internet through organic search.
Against this backdrop, many employment websites end up in the search engine wilderness. However, it is not all bad news out there and you can develop an effective content strategy to make sure you compete with everyone.
On this page, we will cover 3 main topics:
It is Essential to Write Unique Content
When you create a job posting website at QuickontheNet.com, the design and build process is quite fast and the task which will normally take the longest time is writing your page text.
Modern technology makes it easy to copy, cut and paste information, however we would encourage you to go the extra mile and develop original engaging page contents for your employment site.
In particular, if you duplicate content from established and trusted sources online, then you should not expect to rank well on Google and the other search engines. Do not assume you can get around this issue by duplicating content and then changing a few words around. Duplicated content can be sniffed out automatically and downgraded on the search results.
Even across your own site, you should avoid duplicating your own content. Having no page contents or minimal text content is not going to help you either. Text-based content is the fuel for the search engines. Even if your website looks attractive and stylish, that in itself will not help you on the search engine results pages.
Choice of Writing Style
If you do not have the time or the skills, then you should seriously consider employing the services of a freelance copywriter. However, even if you wish to employ the services of a professional writer, it is still beneficial to prepare as much source material as possible.
Let's assume you wish to write your own content and since you know your own business better than anyone else, you should be able to make headway very quickly.
The next consideration is to think about the language, tone and writing style. One possible approach is to imagine you have just met up with an old friend you have not seen for several years, and you get onto a conversation about your recruitment business. The way you describe your business to your friend might set the tone for how you should write your web content, because it should be free-flowing and fluid, portrayed in a positive mindset and use terminology you feel totally comfortable with.
If possible, avoid using too much jargon and technical terms, but keep in mind you will want to use this terminology in your job descriptions, if you believe job-seekers are using these words to search and find job roles. Write a few paragraphs and then check your creative work with friends and colleagues, in order to get constructive feedback.
Staring Into Space and How To Move Forward
If you find that you unable to think straight, you do not know what to write or how to proceed, this is often described as "writer's block". This can be a perfectly normal reaction, particularly if you are creating a recruitment website for the first time.
To help you make progress, we have prepared a handy set of questions to assist you in getting started:
Focus on your Specialist Recruitment Business Sector
As highlighted above, the established multinational recruitment job sites of the internet world can often dominate the search engines, on both the organic results and the PPC sponsored search results.
If you create broad generic page contents, your website can get washed over on the search engines. However, if you focus on your niche recruitment sector, you can often gain a competitive advantage. For example, if you consider the end-user (the candidate and/or the employer), very often these people will perform searches using specialist industry keywords and buzzwords which are specific to their job role. With that in mind, it is important that these words also appear on your job site, particularly on your job description pages.
It is vital to write your content for real people and not for search engines and make sure you do not get bogged down with thinking too much about keywords. For example, if you were writing a letter to a colleague, you would avoid word repetition and the same policy should apply to your web pages.
It would be easy to overload your job site with the words "job" and "jobs", yet with very little extra effort, you can introduce other words across your web pages such as:
"Keyword stuffing" is a term to describe pages which are overloaded with keywords and nowadays this technique can get penalised. Never try to fool the search engines by using hidden text or deliberate spelling mistakes. Keep it simple and always write unique content which is engaging and informative.
Geo Marketing & How to Target Your Local Area
Once again, this is an opportunity to think about your end-users, the people you are attempting to drive to your job site from the search engines.
This is best illustrated using a simple example. Imagine you are an experienced dental nurse, looking for a new job. Perform a search for "dental nurse jobs" on Google and you will be presented by millions of page results.
When that same search phrase is combined with a geographic location, such as "dental nurse jobs manchester", immediately the search results are filtered down to thousands, rather than millions of page results.
Put simply, it is essential to make sure you target the georaphic locations where you provide a recruiting service on your web pages, including regions, city names, town names and even country names.
This is particularly important on your actual job description pages and you can learn how to optimise job pages for search engines.
The same principle applies to other products and services (people are often reassured when they use a local provider), but you simply cannot afford to get this wrong with your careers website. The internet is global but many job-seekers are searching for localised job results, because they wish to work close to home.