SEO Microsites - 5 Things You’re Not Being Told

I’ve never been a big fan of building microsites for the sole purpose of SEO success. Don’t get me wrong, if your current career site is all done in Flash or if it has other technical barriers preventing search engines from accessing your content, a microsite can be helpful for temporary gains within the search engines results. Think if a microsite as the technology that breaks a company’s content and jobs out of applicant tracking system (ATS) jail. Due to some earlier successes, service providers seem to be popping up all over the place.


Microsites May Not be the Answer

Does a microsite give you the best chance of improving your search engine
performance? Nope. Today’s SEO “productized” career site solutions only
tackle the technology side of SEO. They are missing the boat on the
human side of SEO which often delivers higher impact results. That aside,
there are other considerations involved.

1. Renting vs. Owning - Investing in a microsite is similar to renting your home rather owning. When working with today’s career microsites if you decide to leave that particular vendor, the technology that enabled your job content from being found goes with them, leaving you to start all over again. In that respect I guess you could say you’re basically renting your organic job traffic.
   
   


2. Multiple Career Sites - Additional career sites does not necessarily mean you’ll be increasing your visibility, in most cases it’s actually the opposite, more sites to manage and update means you have to split your time & already limited resources across two sites. In my opinion it’s better to concentrate on building one world class career site.
   
   


3. Brand Identity and Audience Engagement Can Suffer - You spend significant corporate energy building positive brand perception and awareness. Brand awareness has a search impact as well. Multiple career sites, especially if developed on a domain other than your companies such as: (www.computer-networking-jobs.com) can be extremely confusing to potential job seekers.
   
   The argument “for” this type of strategy is that it gives you the opportunity to leverage keywords in the domain. While I agree that search engines do take keywords in the URL into account and it is a tactic I actively use, unless the domain has some age/trust to it, the benefit to a site can be negligible. Most microsites are built using newly registered URL’s. A new URL has to put in its time, like every other website – There’s really no short cut to speeding up the process.
   
   


4. Duplicate Content Considerations –Most microsites are sold with a pitch around creating a search engine friendly site that matches the same look and feel of the current company brand. In addition to leveraging your existing design elements, the content from your corporate career site is pulled over and placed within your new microsite. This means you have the same content across multiple websites and search engines frown upon that. Search engines like unique, engaging and fresh content, the more of it the better. Depending on how much content is actually copied over you are at the risk of incurring a search engine penalty.
   
   


5. Building Search Engine Trust through Linkbuilding - A big part of ranking well in search engines continues to be the strength of the external links to the site and not any old link either, but that’s another post altogether. If you maintain multiple sites, then you are diluting that external link value. If five people link to your main site and five people link to your microsite, each site is competing for rankings against the rest of the web with those five links. Instead, you could have one site competing with ten links. Linkbuilding is the most time consuming and frustrating part of SEO, which is why many companies choose not to do it. More sites makes this very important task that much more challenging.z
   

In Closing

Scenarios will always come up where a microsite strategy may make the most sense, especially if it is being built to accomplish a goal other than SEO. However 95% of the time if the sites goal is specifically to increase SEO visibility, you’ll get your best ROI by investing in your own corporate website. Your employment brand stays in tack; you can leverage the search engine trust from your corporate website URL and last but not least, most SEO work completed stays with you.

HOT TOPIC: Social Media, Think You Don't Need It, Think Again

I think this image tells a pretty powerful story all on it's own.

Source = Hitwise, top 20 sites and search engines.

The Importance of Increasing Career Website Engagement

Candidate engagement is a phrase that we hear routinely when it comes to recruiting and corporate career websites. But now more than ever it’s important that employers embrace new tools, technologies and media to build engagement levels. Why?

Google Now Uses “User Engagement” in their Ranking Algorithm

SEO geeks like me that analyze the search engine results day in and day out are starting to see signs of importance placed on “user engagement”. Google wants to know the real quality of a page from the perspective of the target audience it was designed for. By watching what users are doing on sites, a search engine can assign a value to things visitors do and don’t do. Armed with that kind of information they can gauge the value of a website.

What Engagement Metrics Are Tracked?

I am sure that there are more metrics being tracked but as far as the world of SEO can tell. Google is paying special attention to:

• Voting
• Commenting
• Length of stay on a particular page
• Bounce rate
• The Quality of sites linking to you

What Now?

Google’s main goal is to display high quality results that are relevant for their users search queries. One way they measure quality is by watching how people surf the web. They judge what people like and don’t like via voting, commenting, time spent on site, bounce rate and the quality of sites linking to your career site.

Your goal is to create engaging content that candidates will want to read, watch, listen to and interact with via voting, commenting, subscribing downloading and more! At the end of the day, the more you can get visitors to interact with your brand and website, the more “bonus” points you’ll get in the land of SEO and ranking algorithms.