Selling your Service: Search Engine Positioning for Recruiters

In a field where there are many similar products, positioning is absolutely critical for the success of your company. In supermarkets, more expensive brands are strategically placed to the right on the shelves, where our eyes, used to reading books, linger longest. This means we engage more with these products and are more likely to buy it. Cheaper brands are generally placed in harder to see positions (lower shelves, to the left).

Online Positioning of your Business:

The same factors need to be considered when positioning our online recruitment services. The same type of process takes place when users use a search engine. The results page after a keyword search is done, is typically viewed by the user from top to bottom.

Based on eye-tracking studies done by Google, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it, or they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page.

The same way merchandisers fight for positioning in the supermarket aisles, electronic data merchandisers need to fight for a position towards the top of the page, in the area of focus. Being positioned here means the company has a better chance of being selected by the user for further exploration.

What Do You Do to Improve Your Company’s Chances?

So how does this battle for online position work? It’s all about the generation of relevant traffic to your web site. The more traffic to your site, the more relevant and active your site is, the higher Google will rank it in the search results list.

There are many ways this traffic can be sought: natural (organic) search engine rankings Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic through Google Adwords, Yahoo network and others, Blogging, Youtube content, Social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter), Forums, Article marketing (press releases, articles, newsletters, case studies), Traditional advertising (print, radio, TV).

Your ranking on the Google results page is calculated through a complex set of business rules or algorithms. These algorithms calculate a comparative score of your particular website’s relevance in the context of a keyword or key phrase. Google (and the much less used Yahoo) therefore take your Internet site, analyse it and decide how relevant it is compared to other sites in your industry. To do that, they make a series of assumptions about your content; its longevity, quantity and quality, and how popular and dynamic it is. The simplest, most effective and most dependable ways to increase the amount of traffic to your website is to offer more quality content. Better content means people actually read the site, refer their friends to it, and keep checking back to stay updated. A website that has more relevant content added to it over time (and which doesn’t stay exactly the same since the day that it went live) is likely to improve your ranking in search results page.

Therefore your challenge is to understand exactly how more content brings more visitors to your site and how to generate quality content that is related to your particular recruitment industry niche.

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Focused on the recruitment process requirements of businesses that need to source their own candidates or that use one or multiple recruitment agencies to acquire talent.

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Sophisticated semantic matching engine to analyse resumes and rank them against the vacancy criteria, thus producing accurate recommendations more quickly and effectively.

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