First ask yourself the question; do I really need irresistible content on my career site pages and for my online marketing?

• You do if you want Google and its peers to value the content and give it authority when rating your page in search results
• You do if you want to engage with your ideal visitor traffic and keep them coming back to your site and sharing your page
• You do if you want to have your visitors take the action you need them to, when they land on your pages

Where should I place this content?

This may seem like a no-brainer but in fact it's very much depends on what your online goals are for the site and in how many types of visitor you want to have find your site and engage with it. So before knowing what content the pages need, you need to know what the demographic descriptions are of the different visitors you want to have come to your site. Some examples might be:

"Active All Job Seeker types - Specific Job function Active Job seeker types - Passive Candidate types - Inactive job function types - referral contact types - internal referral contact types - geographical job seeker types" and so on...

Granted some of these types can overlap and be a referral, active job seeker and geographical job seeker type. That's fine as long as your site is designed for your main groupings then their interest in your content will any and all the content they find interesting.

When you have the demographic groups sorted, this will focus you to create areas of your site (website structure) that will appeal to these different types and so know where the content can be placed.

What should the pages contain?

I am not telling anyone to suck-eggs here but let's focus on the job advert pages, as our example page area. Do a search for your job title in Google now... thousands even millions of pages indexed with the words you placed in the query box, right? Now look at the content of any of the job ads you find in just the page one result. Be honest, how many of them look more like bland, official job descriptions and nothing like engaging reader content that stands out among the noise of the rest?

My point being, the actual job page is a marketing page about a career with your company and will be the page where the active job seeker will either begin their brand relationship with you by applying for or referring someone to your job, or it will be the last page they see before bouncing from your site to some other website.

What is the best way to deliver this content?

Sticking with our job page and thinking about out range of demographic groups can give you this answer. Let's consider a job for a London Based, "Emerging Bands Reviewer" for the NME (New Musical Express - a music industry publication business the UK for anyone not in the UK or not into music stuff).

Maybe I should not call them a 'pages' and call them job information areas because a flat text only, duties and responsibilities list and a link to a six page online apply form will get zero response form the best possible applicants.  To engage with this demographic you would want to

• Explain the venues they might visit
• Show typical video of the gigs they would be reviewing
• Provide a story of someone who has done the job and their thoughts and what job they are doing now,
• Allow them to see this job on their mobile and let them one click apply via their mobile.
• Let them share the page to Facebook, Pinterest and their other SM channels or add the video to their YouTube account,
• Give them the option to recommend a friend and make sure you reward them in some way for doing it.

The job page is a key page in your career site with the job of converting visitors who find it to take action that will benefit your business, you don't promote your latest all singing and dancing new gadget by making its technical specification the centre of all your marketing efforts do you? The job you looking to hire is no different.

What about other areas of the Career site?

Not all pages of a career site need a detailed content strategy, your previous site structure planning, based on your goal objectives for the site will guide you to what are the important areas. Some of the generic sections I have seen and helped create are:

• The real people view of the business and its culture by those who work in it - not your spin doctors!
• Specialist areas targeting specific demographic type with internal page areas to engage with those types of visitor
• Knowledge sharing areas that appeal to industry professionals you are keen to build relationships with
• The social footprint - what your people and the business is doing outside work - events, sports, charity work etc
• Geo-Location coverage - pages specific to the targeted locations of an ideal visitor types
• Successful hire pages - tell of the experience from the candidate view and the reason they choose your opportunity
• Targeted News pages - you know your target visitors, then you can find out what news they are interested in - write some for them.
• Membership page areas - If you get them to register then give them more from you than just a place to see what job they have applied to. Get them to tell you what else they would like you to provide and then provide it (if viable)

There may some other sections of your site, specific to your industry sector. Once again, your career site goal objectives and demographic groupings will help you define these areas and so the need for feature rich content.

Remember your site is or should be the online hub of all your content messaging and at the centre of your overall digital footprint so make sure when you create this content - whatever it is and on what areas of the site, make sure it can be distributed out to all the other areas of your online presence and make sure that presence is a place where your ideal visitors are actually consuming the kind of content you are distributing.

Doing these things well will make your content engaging - help you find the visitors you want - encourage them to convert on your site - get them to help you distribute your content to their networks - have them motivated to come back to your site time and again. But hay; what do I know. ;o)

Author: Martin Shaw

For more information, please contact martin by email or call him on 07791 673 715.  Or why not connect to him on LinkedIn

About RecruitSmart Technology

Founded by Martin in 2012, RecruitSmart is a company focused on applying any combination of technology, on and off line marketing and communications and all their years of recruitment industry expertise to support a company's talent attraction, acquisition and management strategies.