What does SEO (search engine optimization) have to do with recruiting?

How can good SEO on Google (which concentrates 85% of searches in France) positively impact your ability to attract talent?

The answer is simple: More than 3/4 of the recruitment processes, whether an informational approach from a passive candidate or a specific search from an active candidate, don't make it past a query on the indexing engines.

Working on your natural SEO increases your visibility and therefore helps attract more candidates.

Since there are thousands of job ads on the Internet, candidates naturally gravitate to the ones that are presented to them first.

Then it becomes clear why SEO is not just an option and why it is essential to increase the visibility of your ads and content.

How do you choose from all these books? The best placed ones get your attention.

Why is SEO for recruitment so important?

SEO is all about promoting natural search engine optimization. What does that mean?

The goal of SEO is to make Google understand that your website is the most relevant to answer a given question. If you want to know how SEO works, check out our 20 Great SEO Tips.

Or, where do you think candidates are looking for a job or job/career related information?

If you think they are going directly to job sites or company career pages, you are only partly right.

Candidates may land on your company's career site or job ads, but for most candidates, their search begins with a simple Google search.

It's critical to understand that candidates are no longer searching for jobs the way they did 20 years ago.

From now on, searches are done on the Internet by entering specific keywords.

In addition, Google has developed "Google Job" which aggregates all the jobs from various job boards, company career pages and then shows the most relevant jobs to candidates.

You then understand that the front end of recruitment has become almost completely digitalized and in fact obeys new rules.

How does SEO boost your recruitment

1 - You get more qualified traffic

Seo helps you get traffic. When you search for something on Google, you get several links on each search engine results page (SERP). These links are natural search results (free indexing).

And then there are links with the prefix "Ad" or "advertisement", these are paid results, essentially advertisements that companies pay Google to appear on the first page (paid indexing).

Most people like you and me don't get to the second page of Google search results. According to a study by Chitika Insight, nearly 92% of traffic is concentrated on the first page alone, and even more so on the first two to three links.

With SEO, your recruitment efforts are better rewarded

This means it's extremely important that to drive traffic to your company's web pages, a link from your career site should appear on the first page of Google search results, even better if it's in the top three results.

Being among the top job search results will ensure more traffic to your career site and the content it contains.

More traffic means more candidates applying for jobs at your company, with totally free indexing.

Note: we usually hear that SEO is "free." This is false: optimizing a site and producing content mobilizes skills costs money. Only the SEO of your content is free because it is the basic service that the engines offer.

2 - You are found by talent with niche skills

As a recruiter or business owner, you probably struggle to attract talent with niche skills.

Talent pools for these rare and sought-after skills in the job market are still limited.

This means you can't miss the opportunity to reach out to potential candidates.

Thankfully, being well-listed on Google for these rare jobs is easier, as there are fewer ads than for the more common jobs.

In fact, few companies focus on SEO for recruiting, so you may have an advantage over your competitors.

By working on your SEO strategy to improve your SEO for your ads on these positions, you will then have more visibility to the candidates you are looking to attract.

3 - You're building the value of your employer brand

When your company's website pages appear on the first page of Google search results, it builds trust and credibility for your employer brand.

It's natural for users to believe more in your brand if it appears on the first page of Google search.

This contributes positively to the candidate experience.

Let's take a concrete example: if a person types in the query "forklift operator salary" on Google, they will get the following result:

Thanks to SEO, this recruitment site drives qualified traffic

This is not a "hasard" RegionsJob intentionally worked on its content and SEO to appear in this excellent position.

Why? To offer at the end of the article his own job offers and thus get better results than the competition, simply!"

Other than positioning, this work improves the employer brand value of your company.

Natural search results typically generate more clicks (CTR - click-through ratio) than paid search results, because visitors often avoid ads.

So, if a job-seeking candidate finds pages from your company's website on the first page, they will have a positive first impression and think of you in their job search.

By improving your SEO, you are anticipating your long-term, proactive recruiting needs.

What are some of the challenges you'll face when optimizing your SEO for recruitment?

Here are some basic challenges or limitations you will face when implementing SEO for recruitment.

1 - Update your recruitment technologies and software

Most websites created today are made to meet the SEO rules put in place by Google.

There are modern tools available to help you optimize your SEO for most of your web pages.

The HubSpot solution, which offers Marketing, Sales and Customer Service software to grow your business, includes publishing content on your site with SEO performance tracking and tips to improve your SEO.

HubSpot's editor allows you to tailor your content to today's SEO rules!

Here are examples of important elements to consider for your SEO:

• Is your listing optimized with the Google Search Console?
• Is your career site as well as your ads compatible with smartphones and tablets?
• Is the page load speed fast enough?
• Can your pages be crawled by Google's SEO bots?

Traditional recruiting software or applicant tracking systems may not be optimized to generate optimal recruiting content for SEO.

You should contact your vendor ATS to find out if they meet all SEO guidelines.

2 - Adopt the right reflexes

Seo is not easy and implementing an SEO strategy takes a lot of work and patience.

You need to work consistently to produce quality content that helps improve your domain authority. This is the first step in Inbound Recruiting.

If you do it regularly for a few months, it starts to show long-term results.

And the results are great once you start showing up at the top of the Google search results list.

However, due to a lot of work in the initial phase, people tend to ignore SEO altogether and miss a great opportunity to attract talent.

They rather believe that it is not something that is achievable. They fail to see the big picture.

SEO strategies yield results several months after implementing them but are largely cost effective in the long run.

The first step towards this is to take SEO for recruitment seriously.

The second is of course to contact The Super Agency to work on an action plan!