In my opinion, there are a couple of big reasons Google isn’t in the game, and might not be any time soon:

1. There isn’t enough money in our sector to worry about it. Yes, there is money, but it might not be that high of a priority in the over all Search Marketing Industry.

2. Google can’t easily get the jobs out of the career sites, mostly due to the ATS systems. Most ATS systems have the job content, and that content is not optimized for the web.

3. This is the biggest myth in HR SEO, individual job postings will almost NEVER get enough significant job seeker traffic to make a hire.

This is for several reasons:

First of all, Google ranks pages primarily based on an algorithm that gives higher search engine rankings based on several factors, including the “authority” of the page, and several “on-page” optimization factors. One of the key criteria to “authority”, is the number of quality backlinks to that web page.

Individual job postings don’t have enough backlinks to be considered authorities, and therefore don’t get highly ranked in the search engines.

Another major factor is the number of candidates searching for that specific job posting on the web. Yes, there are over 100 Million “job” related searches performed each month on Google, but the number of searches for a “truck driver in los angeles”, may have only 20 searches in a month. Even if you did get all of the 20 searches to click on your web page, which isn’t likely, you still only had 20 people view the site. Then, you still have to get them to apply to the job… another issue.
A good HR SEO strategy uses Keyword Research to find the right keywords to optimize for, and then builds web pages that will bring in candidates based on the keywords that candidates are already using to find jobs.

In this model, the individual job postings are NOT the primary factors on the web pages, instead, the keywords uncovered in the research are.

I wonder how long the “long tail” is for HR SEO Job Search keywords?

From our experience, the tail is pretty long, but the mass quantity of “job and career” related searches is still focused on the shorter-tail phrases, with the sweet spot slowing after any 4 word phrases.

There are more and more companies marketing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services in the HR  marketplace. While competition in any market is good. It is equally important, as a buyer, to know what you are buying.

Being successful with an HRSEO campaign takes designing a strategic plan, and implementing that plan with a partner who has proven SEO experience.

Scraping jobs from your ATS and putting those jobs on a micro site IS NOT Search Engine Optimization.

Building your Brand and driving candidates to your career site takes Researching keywords, and marketing the career site.

We wrote an article to help you get under way with creating goals for your HR SEO campaign. You can read the HRSEO Goal Setting article here.

Good luck with your campaign.

here’s lots of imitators trying to jump on the HR SEO bandwagon, but we think they always stop at least one step short.  Stop by booth 421- we’re by the food- and ask Jon or Fran why!

Lots of speakers, including Brent Reichow, from TMP, Matthew V. Adam, of NAS Recruitment, and Gerry Crispin, of CareerXroads are evangelizing the importance of Corporate Career websites in the recruiting process. There have been lots of mentions of Career Site Optimization, and of course, SEO4Jobs.com, and driving job seekers your the sites from Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

The buzz is starting, and lots of companies are realizing that SEO isn’t just for the marketing departments anymore.

Hope to see you all there!

Thanks Joel!

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth to hear what we had to say, we look forward to seeing more of you at SHRM in April!