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.
- 2011 (10)
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- 2009 (23)
- 2008 (38)
- 2007 (48)
3 comments:
It is interesting that "bounce rate" can be viewed both positively and negatively. If I run a search and find a result that seems like a good match, click, got to your page, and it is directly on point and easy to read, then I'm going to get the info that I want and almost immediately click away. Google will infer that's a "bounce" and therefore a negative. But isn't that quick hop to and away from your site a good thing even though it is interpreted by Google as a bad thing?
You raise a good point Steven –Bounce rate can be interpreted many different ways, much depends on the type of site. I probably should have expanded a bit more on the post.
Blogs are the exception; they definitely present a unique measuring challenge. Each post is the main attraction; people come, read your latest post, than leave. In this scenario your bounce rates will be high as 50-80% because of how the metric is calculated. Given that, bounce rate alone cannot effectively measure a blog’s relevance to visitors.
When evaluating the effectiveness of a blog you can look at other things. Review the phrases people used to find you, are they relevant? Is your subscriber base growing? What about your audience? (visitors and unique visitors) Are you creating conversations (visitor comments vs. number of posts)
To go a bit deeper into bounce rates. A “bounce” is defined when a visitor leaves your site within a specified timeout period. That time period is determined by the web analytics program that you use.
There are a lot of factors that influence bounce rate but at any rate the goal of a career site should generally be to reduce the bounce rate to as low as possible. The lower the bounce rate the better job the site is doing to keep users engaged. One exception may be a site that is intended to accomplish all relevant user engagement on its landing page. (A blog)
The most important thing to keep in mind is that bounce rates, like most metrics are not black and white. You need to analyze other metrics alongside bounce rate to understand the overall story. Also look at trends, numbers each month are much less interesting.
Love the post Nicole! I agree the “art” of engaging candidates online is something every company and other online recruiting presence should be working to master. And while perfecting candidate engagement online is important for increasing traffic and reducing a site’s bounce rate, it’s also a valuable tool for building a company's Talent Network. By providing great content and leveraging social media tools, companies can continually engage with interested candidates that find their career sites through Google and build a Talent Network that can be a great help in bringing in top talent in the future. You don't want their visit to your career site to be a one time thing but a lasting relationship.
davidh@smashfly.com
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