Any Search Engine Optimization campaign that hopes to have a chance of success must meet the following two goals. When considering your company’s HR SEO Goals, make sure to look at the following:

1. Increase the number of highly qualified and targeted job seekers to your corporate career website.

2. Increase an employer’s brand, through obtaining high search engine rankings for pages that contain content related to the keyword strings that job seekers are using to search for jobs.

It seems like every day a new company is trying to get into the career site optimization business. Most of these vendors are selling the same product or service, something along the lines of “we will pull your jobs from your ATS, create a micro-site that optimizes those jobs, and then send the candidates to your ATS”.

While this approach does create optimized job pages for Google to find, the problem is that the neither of the two primary goals of the SEO campaign are met. This on its own will not lead to more job seekers applying for your open positions. No job seekers will find these pages- it’s not enough just to structure a page so that Google can see it, you have to actively get good quality sites to point to yours, as well- so no brand authority will be achieved.

Let’s take a look at why.

You need to have optimized pages for keyword phrases that job seekers are actually searching for. If no one is typing in “pediatric nurse jobs in Chicago, Illinois” into the Google, Yahoo, or MSN search box (they aren’t), then it doesn’t matter if you spent $10,000 or just $1 on optimizing that page. If no one is searching for that keyword phrase, there will be no job seekers applying for the jobs. When you use Google to search, how often do you go to page two of the results before you find what you’re looking for? Chances are, not very often- in fact, some research suggests that more than 85 percent of all traffic is driven by the first page of results. When you’re optimizing for a longer keyword string (say, 4 words or longer) if you’re not on the first page you are totally irrelevant, because even if you get 100% of the traffic for that particular string, 100% of 10 people is….10 people. That’s not going to drive traffic to your pages.

What DOES work, then?

First, you need to perform keyword research. This entails researching a list of potential keyword search strings, and developing a list of “keyword phrases” that your job seeker target audience is currently using to find your job openings. It’s only after you’ve done this research that you can begin working on designing a “landing page” for your jobs, specifically constructed to rank highly on Google and other search engines for the keyword strings your target audience is using. It’s important enough to stress again- the key to SEO is knowing what keyword phrases your jobseekers are using to look for jobs in the search engines. Only after you know that information can you start designing pages around targeted, highly relevant keyword strings. Once your page is optimized, the next step is to “submit” the page to the search engines.

It’s not a difficult process.

You can’t stop there, however. While the above steps will likely get you indexed in Google, it’s not going to be on page 1, and if it’s a competitive phrase you’re probably not going to be on page 2, 3, or 4 either! The most critical part of SEO is the final and most important step. It’s also the hardest, and most expensive process… that is marketing your career site. Without the proper marketing of your career site and landing pages, your pages are the same as everyone else’s. In order to be an “authority” (and therefore, in the top of the search engines) you need to have other, quality websites point to your pages.

To close, remember, there are 3 vital steps for successful SEO.

1. Conducting keyword research to figure out how to build your brand and drive traffic.

2. Design and create a web page optimized for those keywords.

3. Implementing a landing page marketing strategy to build credibility and authority to these new web pages.

Any HR Search Engine Optimization strategy that does not make use of all 3 of these aspects is destined to fail, and that failure will be measured by the distinct lack of new job seekers to your SEO micro site or career site.