1. Why optimizing your job board for SEO is crucial for success
2. SEO techniques for job boards
3. SEO tools to use when optimizing your job board
Follow this guide to learn the most important strategies, actions and tools for SEO and attract more qualified traffic of job seekers and employers!
1. Why optimizing your job board for SEO is crucial for success
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as "natural" or "organic" results.
In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users: this occurs because web surfers often click on the top few results.
SEO strategies are usually split up into two main categories:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
"On page" SEO helps a website achieve higher rankings in the organic search results through improving the quality of the page's content and HTML structure: in a nutshell, job board sites that are properly structured and rich with relevant keywords specific to your audience will be more successful at attracting job seekers and employers. Niceboard takes care of this automatically for your job board.
"Off page" SEO refers to actions taken off your website or page: at its core, this means having relevant websites link back and/or reference your job board through "backlinks" linking back to your website. All websites have a "domain authority" or score which makes them more or less relevant in the eyes of the search engine. The more high authority websites link back to your job board, the higher chances you'll have of ranking for your target keywords.
2. SEO techniques for job boards
On page SEO for your job board
You’re in luck! Niceboard optimizes all of your job board page titles and basic code structure by default, but you can customize things further to improve your chance of ranking high in search results.
Here are a few things to consider:
a) Use keywords in page titles and meta tags
Your job board should use keywords in its page titles and title meta tags to help search engines recognize their relevance. It is also a good idea to include variations of those words throughout other pages of the job board.
For example, instead of using a title like "Marketing Jobs," chose a more specific and descriptive title like "The best Marketing Manager Jobs in NYC." In your description, include relevant keywords or phrases that your specific job seekers and employers might use when searching for positions or candidates.
Niceboard customers can edit page titles and SEO meta tags in their admin panel, under "Manage board" > "Content" > "Text & SEO".
b) Submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console
An XML sitemap helps search engines better understand what content is available on your site by listing all available pages (and jobs) on your website, to facilitate indexing. Your job board's XML sitemap is also automatically generated by Niceboard and is available at: yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml
Once you've located your sitemap file, create a Google Search Console account (if you don't already have one) and submit the sitemap there: this will help speed up your job board's page indexing and jobs discovery, a key factor in having your jobs show up in the Google jobs results.
In Niceboard, your sitemap is automatically submitted to Goole when connecting your Google Search Console account under “Manage board” > “Other” > “Indexing”.
c) Get featured on Google Jobs with schema markup
Google Jobs scrapes the web for relevant job postings and displays them in form of snippets at the top of search results pages. Having a job from your board featured means more exposure and traffic to your site.
To increase your chances of a job being featured, submit your XML sitemap and add schema markup to your job listings. Schema is a standardized format for classifying content on a page for search engines like Google helping them discover and index all the job content on your site. This will make it easier for job seekers and employers to find your job listings and company profiles via Google.
For Niceboard users, jobs are automatically indexed for Google Jobs through API.
Off page SEO for your job board
Once you've worked on your job board's on page SEO, this is where you'll want to spend your energy next:
a) Drive relevant traffic with blog articles
Using Niceboard's built-in blog CRM, you can write blog posts on your job board about topics relevant to your target audience, helping to improve your chances of getting a higher number of backlinks pointing to your website. Offering a variety of niche posts will help keep visitors coming back for more and help drive traffic to your website. Overall, blogging is an effective way to acquire new job seekers and employers, especially if your job board is focused on a specific expertise or niche.
There’s many blogs out there, so in order to stand out from the rest, we recommend keeping your blog articles highly relevant to your job board niche. Here’s some ideas you can take and adapt to your niche:
- Tips for starting your career in [niche], for example: https://barbelljobs.com/blog/information-on-crossfit-careers
- Prepare for a [niche] interview, for example: https://cybersecurityjob.com/blog/five-entry-level-cyber-security-job-interview-questions
- Importance of technical vs. soft skills in [niche], for example: https://bot-jobs.com/blog/the-role-of-technical-skills-vs-soft-skills-in-a-career-in-conversational-ai
b) Posting to social media
Job seekers often turn to social media when looking for jobs. Sharing your job listings on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn can greatly help increase the number of visitors to your job board. In addition, comments and likes will signal to search engines that people like your jobs or pages, which is an important factor in improving your job board's domain score.
We recommend sharing jobs with a job title, short description, company logo, and company URL for people to share with their followers.
Niceboard customers can use our Zapier integration to automatically detect new jobs, and post them to any third party application, such as LinkedIn. To do so, head over to your admin panel, under "Manage board" > "Automations" > "Zapier", then connect your job board to your Zapier account.
c) Acquiring backlinks
Backlinks are simple links from a third party website pointing to your site increasing domain authority and therefore improving your site’s ranking.
One simple way of acquiring new backlinks for your job board is simply to offer exchanging links with websites related to your niche that have a high domain authority. Once you've found websites whose audience you think would benefit from learning about your job board, try reaching out to their owners to see if they'd be open to linking back to you: in many cases they will if there's a mutual interest.
d) Posting your job board to online directories
Online directories can be a relatively easy source of backlinks and traffic for your job board. You'll find relevant directories with a simple search such as "[your niche] online directory", and will be able to submit your job board for approval.
3. SEO tools to use when optimizing your job board
So you've submitted your sitemap, written blog posts and acquired backlinks. Now what? Here are a few SEO tools that we recommend to monitor your performance and rankings:
- Google Ads Keyword Tool - An easy to use keyword research tool from Google to help you discover which keywords people are using to search for your services as well as those with high traffic and low competition.
- Google Search Console - Free analytics service that provides a wide range of insights on website and app usage and audience demographics.
- SEMrush - A powerful SEO toolkit, including SEO audit software and SEO backlink checker.
Conclusion
Now that you've learned more about the fundamentals of SEO and applied them to your job board, you are now all set up to reach a larger audience and start seeing results in your job board's ranking.
Finally, keep in mind that SEO is a long-term and ongoing effort and that great things take time to build!