It’s no big secret that job seekers are using Google to find jobs. Prior to the emergence of the SEO microsite, when a job related search was conducted on Google, the candidate was inundated with results from the job boards and job board aggregators.
The initial pitch around recruitment microsites was to reduce job board spend and drive traffic directly to your career website. Although SEO career sites have evolved, their main goal is still the same - search engine visibility for your jobs. The problem is, you could be losing your competitive edge.
Lets Look at the Basic Components of SEO
There are 100's of elements involved within an SEO strategy but the 3 key drivers of success fall into the following buckets.
- Accessibility - Can the search engines get to the content and job postings?
- Content - Does the site provide engaging & unique content that includes words and phrases a candidate would use to search?
- Trust & Value - How old is the domain name?, how many websites are linking to it? Does the website provide a quality experience for the user?
Digging Into The Content - Content is king in the eyes of the search engines and the more you have of it the better. However, that content needs to be unique and valuable to your audience. When a candidate arrives on the microsite from a search engine results page, they’re not going to know or care that the site was designed solely for SEO visibility. That said, they expect to see content around what you have to offer them such as benefits, training etc. Rather than provide this content in a unique way, one of the below strategies is generally utilized.
- Content is Copied – Content around benefits, diversity etc. is scraped from the existing corporate career site and added to the SEO microsite. This method actually creates duplicate content and search engines frown upon content being available on multiple websites. Generally, you won’t get SEO credit and quit often the search engines will penalize you with decreased visibility.
- Linking to Content – Instead of pulling the content into the SEO microsite, buttons are created on the microsite for benefits, diversity etc. but when a visitor clicks on the button, they’re taken to the corresponding page within the corporate careers website. This strategy is not good for a few reasons.
- It takes visitors away from the microsite or at the very least distracts users by opening a new window.
- You’re not building up the content & trust of the SEO microsite. If the SEO microsite is not seen as providing value, it will be difficult to drive organic traffic.
Trust & Value – Microsites are built outside of the main corporate domain which means you have to invest time and resources in building up the domain that the microsite resides on. The way to establish trust is by developing a strategy to get quality and topically related sites to link to the microsite. The time involved in this is dependent on the domain strategy used but the majority of the time you’ll have some work to do and it's not fun.
Stop Looking For An Easy Way Out — There Isn't One!
I can't lie; the microsite strategy does work for a limited time. Why wouldn’t it, you’re making something that was once invisible, visible - of course you’ll see some traction. But be warned the recruitment SEO market is getting much more competitive and the search engine algorithms are getting more sophisticated. If everyone is doing the same thing, there is no competitive edge.
At the end of the day, the best investment you can make is incorporating SEO best practices into your own corporate careers site. You have no content worries, the domain is already established and highly trsuted, you don't have to worry about diluting your brand or confusing potential candidates. Choose the road less traveled, you'll get so much more for your money.
2 comments:
I completely agree with your analysis, Nicole, but microsites can be beneficial in some situations such as where an employer has very different hiring needs that appeal to very different people. For example, an employer may have a large number of positions for relatively unskilled workers (i.e., package handlers) yet may also have positions for highly skilled workers (i.e., finance, logistics). Situations like that scream for either different sections of a career site or microsites or both. The information that the package handlers want and should see will be quite different from the information that the more skilled candidates want and should see.
At the end of the day, SEO is mostly about creating a web site which is easy-to-navigate and content rich. If it works well for humans, it works well for Google, Bing, and the other search engines. Tricking the search engines will end up doing you a lot more harm than good. I know we're on the same page about that.
Hi Steven, thanks for commenting. I agree that there are situations where the microsite strategy is beneficial.
I guess my main point was that if SEO visibility is important than there has to be a strategy in place. Organic search engine visibility doesn’t magically happen.
A lot of the microsites you see today simply provide job listings and overly optimized landing pages. Other than making the jobs available, in my opinion they don’t offer anything of value that can’t be found elsewhere, not to mention that user experience is lacking.
SEO is not a set-it-and forget it kind of thing. If you go down the microsite route be prepared and willing to invest in what’s needed to achieve the level of visibility you're looking for.
In a perfect world, we'd stop creating multiple sites and go with a persona-based methodology instead. But I have a feeling that may be a few years out.
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