SEO is one of the fastest evolving marketing channels within the digital landscape. With a multitude of sites for every possible need in day-to-day life, good SEO has become a vital practise to get your site noticed. Like any site, job boards need to ensure they are ranking for relevant keywords to stand out from the competition to drive organic traffic. Without an SEO strategy and failing to focus specific campaigns this can result in dwindling visitors to your job board.

A big part managing your SEO activity and success lies in utilising analytics data and reporting. Analytics software is widely used to understand how visible your job board is to major search engines, understand user journeys and identify which content is most popular.

Search engines are constantly working to refine the search experience for users with constant updates to their algorithms. This means you need to respond to the latest search changes to maintain a strong presence on organic rankings.

Website owners are channeling huge amounts of effort and resources in order to gain visitors, but what happens when users get there? Our focus on our ability to be found by search engines has overshadowed the importance of measuring onsite activity. Currently we are caught in a system of sending traffic to our site but not focusing enough on analysing how users are interacting with what it has to offer. But why is it so important to learn about your users on site journey?

What keywords are jobseekers using on your job board?

Do you know what jobseekers search for on your job board, which keywords they are using and what your most popular sectors are? Analysing search strings and the language used in search by jobseekers allows you to build job adverts that are more likely to appear in searches. This not only helps jobseekers find the job adverts they are looking more quickly, but also improves user experience. This knowledge can be fed into job advertisements to make them appear more often in searches helping to increase application rates.

Analysing search behaviour and keywords can also help in your content strategy. Popular searches can often point out content which would be great for blog posts and social media campaigns. Finding content that is useful for your audience will also increase the chances of it being shared, not only will this ensure more people are coming into contact with your job board, but it also has a positive effect of on SEO, proving that what you measure onsite is relevant to your offsite campaigns.

Integrated marketing campaigns

Big data is a popular subject this year and having access to detailed and quality search data can play a huge part in creating successful marketing campaigns. As any good marketer knows leveraging data is of paramount importance to ensure users receive information relevant to their individual needs.

For generalist job boards reviewing which sectors and industries are most popular with recruiters and jobseekers can provide answers for where you need to focus your marketing efforts. If you have an influx of retail jobs on your job board, in order to keep application rates up and recruiters happy you may choose to create an email campaign for any jobseekers with a retail preference or experience. For niche job boards analysing the variations of a specific job role could also aid application rates, by allowing you to target groups of candidates with that particular experience.

By analysing your data and segmenting your audience you can provide more relevant information to your jobseekers. Targeting specific users with job posts or content which is directly relevant to their skills and experience leads to a more personalised marketing experience. This degree of personalisation will increase return visits to your job board, high conversions and uplifts in application rates.

Harnessing your social media audience

Today social media is part of most job boards marketing mix and playing an increasingly important role to engage and build relationships with audiences. Search data can be hugely helpful to design and create social media campaigns spreading your reach to those who may not have used your site yet. By utilising social features such as hash tags influenced by your onsite analytics you can build a successful campaign and entice even more users back to your job board. Aligning your search data to your social content creation and activity will drive more relevant traffic to your job board.

Making an effort to learn how your audience uses your job board can teach you more than which job adverts receive the best applications. Most importantly it is crucial to understand how your audience use your job board, you can make as many predictions as possible, but nothing will tell you what does and doesn’t work as well as the dedicated users of your site.