Making sure your target audience sees your job posting is a crucial step in selecting the best applicant for your available opportunities. Prospects are actively seeking positions similar to the ones you have open. Your marketing reaches the talent by making these job postings more optimized for higher ranks.

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WHY SEO MATTERS FOR JOB POSTINGS If your website and your job postings do not show up when candidates are searching, the applicant pool will be much smaller than it could be. You will miss out on people who have the right skills and interests to align with your company. You may get a few visitors who stumble across your posting or who are searching hard, but you may not attract the wide audience the job deserves. With search engine optimization, you tailor your content, including job postings, to be relevant to searchers.

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GOOGLE FOR JOBS Google is one of the giants driving home the importance of SEO. Google for Jobs gathers job postings from all around the internet, positioning them in front of job seekers. It does not matter where your job posting is situated, whether it’s on your own site or a listing site. Google crawls the web for these listings and tries to deliver them in a relevant way, based on SEO. As you post jobs on your website, you should be using google structured data set-up to ensure that these listings appear in Google Job Search. By providing as much information as possible, you will attract applicants who are filtering searches for exactly what you are offering. According to Google, this increases the chances of discovery and of people clicking over to your site to actually apply. Be sure to remove job posting as they expire, as Google insists users take timely action on these outdated links. If you fail to do this, Google’s human reviewers may issue a manual action indicating your site is out of date. This lowered your page ranking or can even omit the site from search engine response pages entirely.

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USING THE RIGHT KEYWORDS Today’s job postings often look a lot different from job postings of the past. Many companies are searching for gurus and ninjas and other quirky descriptors instead of being clear about the exact role needed. It appears as a fun way to set your job description apart, but those terms, instead of relevant keywords, can send the posting into oblivion. Most people who want a job would not search for buzzwords but the actual job that matches their experience. Make sure that your job postings include those relevant keywords, so the listing is returned as a search engine result. You can also include relevant keywords in the job description. Try to think about the role from the perspective of your ideal candidate and what they might be searching for. That content should include, at the least, the job title written out in full and the location. Be as specific as possible, and include industry-specific terms where they are relevant. Use alternative job titles or abbreviations for your keywords to cover your bases.

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BACKLINKS, SEO, AND JOB POSTINGS Backlinking, or having your link placed on other relevant and trustworthy sites, makes a difference with your SEO. The more your job opening is posted and shared, the more Google and other search engines will see it as quality, relevant content. So, how can you get your posting listed in places other than your own website? Social media can be quite helpful with backlinking and SEO. Share your posting on your own corporate social media accounts, from Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn. Be sure to use the same URL across all shares, and consider including an eye-catching image or well-written copy. Post the same URL on quality, high-traffic job boards. This will help with backlinks and also serve to have the job appear on Google’s job search system. You can also share your job posting in innovative ways on your own website. You could write a blog post about the hiring process or a day in the company life, for example, linking to the specific job posting. This relevant content may be picked up and linked by another website, increasing the reach of your job posting