Is SEO Destroying Your Employment Brand?

In the last few years, a lot of emphasis has been placed on the importance of corporate career site visibility. So much so, dozens of vendors have popped up promising that their solutions will unlock the door to top search engine rankings. With millions of job related searches conducted monthly on Google alone it only makes sense that organizations would want to adjust their recruitment marketing strategies in order to reach this audience, but could you be destroying your employment brand in the process?

Introducing SEO 3.0

Search engines have a simple goal: to give people the most relevant answers to their questions as quickly as possible. Achieving this goal requires constant tuning of their algorithms. Many of the changes made are usually so subtle that very few people notice them. However, two announcements made this year have forever changed the SEO industry and how recruitment strategists should market employment brands online.

• Google announced they are starting to factor social signals into their organic algorithm. This means that social media and community engagement will have a significant impact on organic search engine visibility.

• A major algorithm update (Panda/Farmer) was pushed. This update is geared towards finding and filtering low quality sites and sites designed solely for SEO purposes. This is an ongoing update scheduled to run every 5 weeks or so.

What Defines a Low Quality Website?

The signals that identify low quality sites are unknown but from what the SEO industry has seen so far some of the considerations seem to include: link to content ratio, over optimization and duplicate content. It’s also important to note that Google has said publicly that even if you have a great site, if you have some pages that are low quality within that site, they can drag down the rankings of the website as a whole.

The big unanswered question right now is if you have low-value content on a sub-domain (careers.companydomain.com) and it gets hit with the Panda filter, is your main domain (company.com) now at risk by association?

It’s a real possibility, if you think about it, part of the benefit of using a sub-domain is that some of the trust established on the main domain carriers over, so why would it not work the other way around? Again, it has yet to be proven with data but it’s definitely something to be aware of. When it comes to something as important as SEO, "outsource it and forget about it" should not be an option. In the eyes of Google and other search engines ultimately, the company is responsible for the actions of SEO vendors.

What this means for Recruitment SEO

In the past recruitment SEO tactics included the classic elements such as developing quality content, making it accessible to search engines, doing keyword research, including those keywords strategically and then building a few links. SEO strategists didn’t have to think much about the experience of the career site or whether you were helping to develop a brand that people are going to love, share, reward and trust. Now we do. Search Engine visibility in the 3.0 world will mean paying attention to things like:

• Usage Data (CTRs, bounce rate, time on site)
• Brand Metrics (brand search volume, SM presence & brand mentions)
• Social Metrics (FB shares, comments, likes, tweets)

Virtually everything you do on the web with your career website can now impact SEO.

The Way Forward

As we move into 2012 it’s not whether you’ll invest in SEO, it’s how. Career website optimization has become too overblown for its own good. The recent changes are clear indicators that it is time to get back to basics, be true to your employment brand and provide content that will resonate with potential candidates while not adding to the clutter.