Before I even start, I want to be clear that I believe that search engine optimization (SEO) is an extremely important tool for HR. This post is not about whether or not SEO is a good tool, it’s about some of the practices being used in this industry and why they aren’t always all they are hyped up to be.
First, what is search engine optimization? The definition taken from Wikipedia is: “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords.”
What is important in that definition? SEO is improving traffic to “a web site”. SEO is not creating a mirrored site or separate site. In this case, you are not really optimizing your site, you are building a work-around. Additionally, if you are building something that sits outside your main career site, you are not building your brand. There are many companies (and more starting up each day) that are more than willing to sell you on their optimization services. But all they really do is build a mirror site (usually a poorly branded one), submit your site, and make your jobs slightly more accessible to search engines.
Here are a few things to look out for when purchasing SEO services:
- A legitimate SEO provider will never make a guarantee around specific placements. It’s ok for a vendor to say they guarantee to improve your rankings, but it isn’t OK if they say they will make you #1, #5 or #20 in the rankings. Search engines change their rankings all the time and new content is created all the time. There are no guarantees, even the search engines themselves will tell you this.
- Creating a Mirrored Site. The point of SEO is to optimize your career site. Any company that is just creating a separate site with just your job postings and no branding content is not optimizing your site, they are optimizing another site. Even when they funnel all the traffic through your ATS, those candidates are still not seeing your branding or learning about your organization. Technically, Indeed, SimplyHired and the like are all doing this for you for free (just minus a few customizations). Also, consider the long term implications. A well-designed site with relevant, rich content will always be an advantage. A mirror site controlled by another company can go away at any time. If it were my money, I’d spend it on improving my site.
- The keywords they report and optimize against are only very specific phrases that you should come up for anyway. You should already be coming up high for keyword phrases that include your brand. If you aren’t – then your career site has bigger problems than search engine optimization. There are probably very specific design, content or organizational issues with your site that need addressing.
- Anyone who says SEO can replace all other forms of advertising. SEO is a great, economical channel. But is only one channel and you can’t put all your eggs into one SEO basket. You will still need a comprehensive marketing strategy.
SEO practices that make your site more user friendly, your content more relevant, and your jobs more accessible are smart investments and always will be. These investments will show long-term improvements in your candidate acquisitions costs and your candidate user experience. Just make sure that the vendor you are working with understands that your goals are long-term improvements and not short-term, bandaid improvements.
Don’t believe me? Here are a few resources that you should review before working with an SEO vendor:
What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?
From Yahoo! Search: How do I improve the ranking of my web site in the search results?
From Search Engine Watch: Intro to Search Engine Optmization
From SEO Today: Evaluation SEO Vendors
From SEOConsultants.com: Questions to Ask Your Potential SEO Company
April 9, 2008 at 12:33 pm |
You could do worse than to check Google’s guidelines, too:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
April 9, 2008 at 12:58 pm |
Fantastic advice! SEO isn’t an all-encompassing fix for all of your marketing needs. It’s only a tool in your marketing arsenal. Heck, it’s not even the only way to get yourself marketed online — you can also do SEM and other methods too. The main thing, as you point out, that SEO is going for is the organic traffic. That’s the key: it’s the organic traffic that’s targeted to your site. If you’re talking to an SEO company and they want to do something for you that doesn’t involve your site, or getting links to you site, you should definitely question their intentions. One of the best tools that I’ve always recommended to people is to educate themselves. You don’t need to become an expert, but learn a little bit about SEO so that you can ask some good questions to the prospective company you’ll hire.
April 9, 2008 at 2:17 pm |
Agreed! Education is important. Although it’s not always that easy. Especially in the HR industry where marketing is just a small part of the responsibilities of our clients. It is easy for vendors to take advantage. Some of these overhyped HR-specfic SEO companies even have industry expert endorsements. It’s shameful.
April 9, 2008 at 5:32 pm |
Building a work-a-round outside of your career website does not necessarily mean you are not building your brand. It really depends on the product specifications. In the case of Jobs2Web, an SEO product that I helped create, it most definitely is company branded.
Keep in mind also that some career website’s would need a complete re-design in order to be search engine friendly. Career sites that are built with frames or pop-up’s don’t have much of a chance for being successful organically.
I agree that SEO should not be your only strategy but it is certainly an important one these days with all the job related searches being done directly within the search engines.
PPC or SEM is another tactic as Morgan pointed out but one thing to keep in mind is even paid advertising requires SEO, if your pages are not optimized to fit Google’s quality guidelines you’ll end up paying way more then the guy who has optimized their landing pages.
There are some shady service providers out there, if anyone promises you specific rankings or mentions being able to get you 100’s of links for pennies – Run!
April 9, 2008 at 6:18 pm |
Thanks so much for the comment Nicole! I completely agree with your points about SEM and the difficulty of re-designing the career site. And I understand the importance of getting the jobs into the search engines.
However, I have to disagree about the work-a-rounds. Including a logo and limited information is not the same as fully branding the client and seems to be the standard practice. Many of these work-a-rounds do not even link to the career sites. That means the candidates that are applying are not learning about the employer or the employer’s culture, which is usually not good for candidate quality.
Also, the work-a-rounds are only temporary fixes. When those contracts are over and/or those mirror sites are shut down, the client’s ranking is no better off. It’s almost as if they have “leased” search engine placement. Those same funds could have been invested in meaningful changes to the career site’s usability, accessibility, organization, functionality and content that would have made long-term impact.
I understand the motivation for using a work-a-round, however I am advocating for optimizing the career site.
April 9, 2008 at 7:21 pm |
Laura – Absolutely! I would love to see more clients invest in making their own career site better, I agree that this is the BEST approach.
April 14, 2008 at 10:52 am |
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October 15, 2008 at 2:59 pm |
Great bullet points. People need to watch google guidelines closely to ensure they don’t get themselves in to trouble. It can be a costly mistake to do so.
January 23, 2009 at 6:32 am |
hey good info.
June 3, 2009 at 12:17 pm |
I have been providing web site repair and SEO services for more than five years. I am sickened by the number of unscrupulous “SEO” companies that popped up almost overnight.
Many seem to capitalize on the “Google Sandbox Effect,” which I believe to be an urban legend born in part, by poor SEO practices. When sites do not get indexed people have blamed Google instead of looking to the number of poorly-done websites. I have never had a site “sandboxed” but I do not launch sites that are not already as close to perfect as possible.
There is no point in paying someone to create metadata unless your website is well designed, has quality content, and friendly navigation for humans and robots. Why should Google (or any search engine) promote cruddy sites? Instead of blaming finicky search engines, blame your SEO company for site failure or for making promises they simply cannot hbnor.
I refuse to provide even basic SEO services to any client who’s website is full or bad links (or link farms) and malfunctioning scripts and navigation. What is the point of trying to drive traffic to a broken-down website? No one will come back – including web crawlers.
This is something I tell all my clients … robots, by nature want to crawl your site. No SEO company deserves bragging rights for getting a robot to visit your site they will do that on their own in most cases. A professional should make sure your entire site is working so that robots can crawl and digest information on your website in a way that helps you in search engine returns.
Anyone can get robots to come to your site – but will they index it? A true SEO professional will ensure robots have something to feed on besides metadata so they will keep coming back and indexing more pages. This will increase your chances of appearing in search engines.
Thank you for pointing out that SEO is not about keywords but about the entire website. Any SEO company that offers you canned services and who has not first looked at your site AND researched your industry, is one to run from.
June 24, 2009 at 9:04 am |
Your site and posts are very interesting ! Thanks for providing such a great resource. With so many junk sites out there it’s refreshing to find one with valuable, useful information ! I’ll be back to read regularly !
Thanks,
Jeanine