When you are advertising and ready to hire top talent, it’s important to have a strong, consistent and well-optimized presence on job posting sites, high-traffic job boards and LinkedIn.

If a job candidate is interested in your company, he or she will immediately go into research mode and scour the Internet for more information. You should expect job seekers to visit your company website to learn more about leadership, culture, and other available jobs in their field.

For employers and site owners, you can improve the job seeking experience as well as your company’s recruitment pipeline by building out and optimizing a careers section on your site.

Google for Jobs

With Google for Jobs, Google prioritized helping both job seekers and employers by enhancing the search engine results page (SERP) user experience (UX) for job postings.

Now, job postings will have more prominent placement in SERPs for job-related search queries. You will see SERP features like a company logo, reviews, ratings, job details, and a dedicated job search user interface (UI) that lets searchers explore jobs without leaving the SERPs.

This new user experience enables job seekers to focus their search queries based on these specific factors:

• Location
• Department
• Date Posted
• Employer

It’s imperative hiring managers work directly with search engine optimization specialists (SEOs) to ensure each page can be found simply and easily, especially for corporate-level companies. With that in mind, take the time to update the architecture of your careers section and job postings for both discovery and conversion.

Careers section best practices

A discoverable careers section of a company’s website starts with an organized category architecture. Using a folder structure that incorporates location and department will segment job applications in a way that people will navigate naturally.

Take a look at what you have to offer with each job posting,  corporate-level companies with many global offices may need to have location be a prominent factor of the content, especially if departments are segmented by the office. In this case, it makes sense to lead category pages with location types.

Take the conversion funnel into the account, non-branded and branded search terms will bring in two completely different types of people. You can assume people who found the job posting via branded search terms are considering working with your company more heavily, but may also have other brands on their shortlist.

It’s important to keep your careers section well-organized so they can find the information they need quickly and easily. Most companies will simply need to break job roles down by department structure, group them together and branch out from there as needed.

Optimize your job posting

Job seeking is an incredibly personal journey, so it’s important to put yourself in the job hunter’s shoes by asking these questions:

• What are they looking for in their first job?
• What do they need from their next job?
• If you’re looking for a natural leader, what types of titles are they drawn to?

The following example illustrates total monthly phrase match search volume for Lyft.  Specific modifiers were segmented (driver, jobs, careers, etc.), showing that roughly 11 percent of all of Lyft’s branded searches are employment related.

For people aware of the Lyft brand, that’s a significant amount of people looking for both day-to-day driver and corporate jobs all around the United States each month.

Just like other discoverable content, you need to build your careers pages with user intent in mind. To ensure your job posting is found, you need to treat it like you would any other landing page. It needs to have enough information to tell a good story and incredibly relevant keywords that are easy to understand in the title tags.

Since people typically search for a specific type of job, experience level, type of company, or type of industry, it makes sense to include that information in the title tags. For example:

• Title (SEO Specialist) | Type of Company or Industry (Entry-Level Jobs in Digital Marketing Agency)
• Title (Cosmetics Engineer) | Type of Company or Industry (Engineering Jobs in Beauty Industry)

Organize the job posting to meet a job hunter’s expectations. That means defining the purpose of the role, its day-to-day responsibilities, and providing a short summary of the general career path for the ambitious.

Depending on experience level, it becomes more and more applicable to integrate jargon, technical terms, or industry lingo. Weave in information about the company where you can.

Do what you can to make job postings as concise as possible. Every job description has a certain level of expectations in terms of format, it starts with requirements and ends with nice-to-haves. Assume a job hunter is looking at as many jobs as possible, so make it brief, easy to skim, and memorable.

That’s why using clear headings, video and bullet point lists are so common; here is an example:

How do I get my job postings to pop in the SERPs?

With the right page elements, you should have no problem appearing in Google SERPs.

It’s important to add job posting structured data to your jobs pages. Using structured data for job postings ensures that Googlebot can crawl your job posting easier as well as provide a signal that specific content is relevant and accurate enough to display on the search results page.

If you can’t add the schema markup yourself,  it should be easy to find a freelancer who can. Test and preview your structured data using this public tool from Google.

At that point, it’s just doing your due diligence to ensure Google can crawl the page. Double check and ensure that the job postings section are indexable, and submit new sitemaps whenever there are changes to your job postings. If a job is no longer available, make sure to use a noindex meta tag and say so on the job page.

Run authentic job postings

It’s important to remember job postings may be the first touchpoint a person will have with your company. Treat them like landing pages,  they need to be able to say a lot of information with just a few words.

It’s important to represent yourself properly so the applicant knows exactly what there is to know about your organization. Non-branded search terms such as “careers in SEO” or “SEO jobs near Phoenix” indicate that a potential applicant may not be aware of your company or are open to competing companies. Phrases such as “SEO jobs at ZOG Digital” indicate that a person is instead looking for a specific job type with your company, rather than a job type or a company.

That’s why your job content needs to be realistic, accurate and truthful in order to satisfy their job hunt needs. Your brand, experience-level, or industry can influence the tone of the job posting. Long-form, in-depth content about your company and departments is a great way to generate top-funnel visibility and begin a recruitment pipeline years in advance, even if a job description isn’t prepared yet.

Audience goals, business needs

In past pieces, we discuss aligning audience goals with business needs, and it remains true here.

For example, an entry-level account executive role at a Yelp has enough breathing room to allude to the team culture throughout the job posting and the fully-stocked Yelp kitchens certainly don’t hurt!

If the potential applicant gets curious about other sales roles or about how the team functions, they meet that need with category-level content for sales and account management.

What’s interesting is that they have two sets of identical job postings in different categories. One set specifically targets self-motivated, competitive college grads with their own category-level content and job postings that are more specific to launching a five-star career.

Their content is conversational even when discussing a robust training program, ensuring that people are willing to travel to one of their five U.S. offices. This category also siphons out the other sales and account management roles that may require more experience as well.

To ensure that your job posting is found by top talent, it’s imperative to do what you can to your career site to ensure it’s discoverable. If you’re eager to identify top talent and improve your recruitment pipeline, job search optimization is well worth the investment.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

The European Commission announced that UK based companies and residents that own .EU ccTLDs will have to surrender those domain names after Brexit. The notice reads:

As of the withdrawal date, undertakings and organisations that are established in the United Kingdom but not in the EU, and natural persons who reside in the United Kingdom will no longer be eligible to register .eu domain names or, if they are .eu registrants, to renew .eu domain names registered before the withdrawal date.

This obviously has serious implications for those who have branded their companies or brands around .EU TLDs. Not only will they not technically be able to own or use the domain name for their web site, UK citizens/companies also will not be able to redirect the domain name to a .co.uk or other TLD migrated to.

In addition, this loss of domain ownership can have implications for reputation management and encourage domain squatting.

Brexit is currently scheduled for March 30th, 2019, so if you believe the European Commission will enforce this, it might make sense for .eu domain owners to consider setting up a new domain name now. This gives you time to prepare the branding and marketing around a new domain name and of course set up the 301 redirects and any impacted hreflang changes a year in advance.

It is obviously best from an SEO perspective to have 301 redirects from one URL to another URL forever but if that is impossible, the longer you have 301 redirects in place, the better off you are with Google, Bing and other search engines.

The Register reports there are about 300,000 domains under the .eu top-level domain that have a UK registrant.

You can read the full announcement in this PDF document.

Google recently announced a new mobile ranking algorithm it is calling the “speed update”.  Google states the speed update will “only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and only affect a small percentage of queries”

Let me begin by saying: page load times are already a huge part of Google’s mobile ranking algorithm. They have been for some time now and are an important signal directly related to site traffic.

In the different cases below, you will see just how huge of an impact page speeds have. Google traffic seems to spike and plummets for some websites with varying desktop and mobile issues. Hopefully, something I share will help you persuade those reluctant on decreasing their load times motivation to do so.

The benefits of fast

The benefits of quicker load times are nothing new. Looking at load time is smart, it has always been a large factor in a user’s experience and integral for the success of any digital campaign regardless of ranking impact.

With the announcement of “mobile first,” Google has just allowed search engine optimization specialists (SEOs) to move optimizing site speed items from the depths of the dev backlog into the hotfix category. If your company or clients are still reluctant to place resources into it,  it may be time to readdress the situation. Let them know that their competition is likely to fill the holes left by not optimizing your site speeds or taking a serious look at accelerated mobile pages (AMP).

For our purposes, we are most concerned with Googles “speed” and “score” ratings on PageSpeed Insights since they give us direct insight into what Google sees for that particular uniform resource locator (URL).  There are but a few instances where Google will actually come right out and give you a score on one of its ranking factors, so take advantage.

Also, remember that visibility in search is only half the battle if you are focused on success metrics. It is by far the more difficult of the two, but it is still only half the battle

Case study #1

This mid-sized website in the big data vertical had recently (February 2017) undergone a complete redesign which was about a year or two in the making. The goals of the redesign were to:

• Create a responsive site
• Significantly alter and decrease the established sites content levels on 400k URLs (placing more behind a paywall)
• Increase conversions
• Not lose any of the traffic gained from previous SEO efforts.

The redesign launch was very rocky from a technical aspect, mainly due to a lead engineer who is no longer with the company. Eventually, months after the redesign launched, many mid-level priority recommendations were finally being implemented and traffic increased nicely.

Post re-launch / SEO campaign

*Note: Traffic increases were very stable for months before “the incident”

Needless to say, making the site mobile friendly definitely had a big impact on increasing mobile traffic. I guess this suggests site speed as a mobile ranking signal, post-April 2015, is a pretty big signal.

Challenges

After letting go of their lead engineer, they had very limited technical resources while they hunted for a replacement. Many of the SEO recommendations submitted even for basic, best practices, were sitting in a very long backlog. Luckily, much of the site speed optimizations were already slated in the next few weeks, but there is nothing like a giant dip in traffic to increase the priority level of backlogged recommendations.

When traffic tanked:

Most of the nice year-over-year gains had disappeared showing a drastic reduction. The 50 percent increase in mobile traffic had dwindled to almost no gain. While much less drastic, even the desktop site appeared to lose whatever steam it had gained. The decline was caught within the first week and a forensic analysis was started immediately. Most items checked out just fine except for the report from PageSpeed.

This screenshot tells close to the whole story. Prior to the heavy dip, they rated “poor” but showed a score of 40 for mobile and 60 for desktop. (Note: URL has been altered to keep client anonymous)

The site has two content management systems at play with different functions, WordPress and Ruby.  While the WordPress portion of the site only makes up a small percentage of total URLs (maybe 1%), it does manage the highest traffic generating pages like the blog, homepage, etc.

The home page dropped by 24 percent and other high trafficked WordPress content tanked by close to 50 percent. This also appeared to have a systemic effect on content outside of WordPress but nowhere near as severe; most of the Ruby pages were showing slight dips.

After several discussions and looking at the results, it appeared that there were two likely culprits responsible for the plunge.

First, the content delivery network (CDN) service cache was found to be misconfigured and wasn’t operating in their WordPress environment.

The second action taken was to enable WordPress compression for images and image resizing tweaks were made.

Over the next week, the fixes were implemented, page speed scores shot back up to more acceptable levels scoring higher than previous tests.

Returning to normal 

While there is much more to be done to optimize for a higher score, the issues were corrected. I have been seeing similar examples across multiple websites and they all seem to come down to one common denominator: Speed!

Case study #2

This case study is an enterprise level website in the news and media sector experiencing large traffic declines.

The declines were affecting both their mdot and desktop site. (If you are not familiar with a mdot site, it is a website designed for mobile devices and sits on a separate subdomain. And yes the client knows they need to get rid of the mdot!)

After performing a forensic analysis, we found the enterprise level site had so many requests and loaded so slowly it broke Pingdom’s load times tool! After attempting to load 1600 requests on a single URL, Pingdom just locked up.

We used an article page and one of the lighter pages, not the home page or large category type pages. In the 18 years I’ve been a practicing SEO, I have never seen that happen. While the cause is not as crystal clear as the first case, once requests and page elements were reduced, the client saw a healthy return of traffic.

Case study #3

My third case study is another mid-sized website. The owner contacted me about some “softness” in their traffic growth. He had spent significant time raising the site’s page speed scores over the summer but had not made any other changes to the site.  And yet, their page speed scores deteriorated slightly in Q4 of 2017.

This left me with some burning questions:

• If nothing else changed on the site, what else could cause a drop in the PageSpeed score?
• Is it possible their “industry” peers’ recent efforts to load faster are being factored into the score?
• Has page speed been slowly and steadily raising the bar to prep for the mobile first launch?

Interestingly, the site’s PageSpeed dipped for no apparent reason from September to November 2017 and yet, miraculously increased from a mobile score of 46 in November 2017 to a 71 today using the new insights tool.

While the client is currently working on making some improvements, still nothing has been deployed that would affect load times since the summer of 2017.  I find this, as Spock would say, “Fascinating!”

Conclusion

To sum things up, page load times are a huge factor in your SEO efforts. Even though this is probably not new to you, use the announced date to help raise a reluctant client’s awareness or push load time optimization a little further.

As Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan recently said:

One thing is for certain: working on improving your speeds will significantly increase traffic, page views and decrease bounce rates. That is something that most teams from design to development will get behind without (too much) grumbling.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.