What are category pages for job boards? They’re basically specialized landing pages for each job category like job seniority, location, or department.
Inspired by what eCommerce has been doing for years, niche job boards can benefit from adopting a similar strategy and rank for more specific job searches.
Once you’ve understood this, you’ll find a whole new set of SEO optimization and marketing options for your job board.
The benefits of category pages for job boards
The perks are clear: they help both users and search engines organize your content and make it easier to find what they’re looking for. And here’s how:
- Content structuring: Category pages help structure your site in a way that search engines love. They make it easier to index your pages and understand the relationships between them, which can improve your rankings.
- User experience: For users, well-organized category pages simplify the search process, directly leading them to the jobs they're interested in. This can enhance your site’s user engagement and reduce bounce rates.
- Targeted SEO: Each category page acts as a mini-hub for a specific topic or keyword, such as "entry-level designer jobs in Chicago". You can capture more organic traffic from niche searches with this targeted approach. Why? Because you'll face less competition and hence achieve higher rankings.
- Filling more roles: particularly for hard-to-fill roles, category pages allow you to focus your efforts on specific demographics or job types, increasing the likelihood of attracting the right candidates.
How to implement category pages?
Start by identifying relevant keywords that job seekers would look for. The more specific, the better your chances of ranking high are, since there will be less competition. Ideally, you want a good balance between medium-high search volume and low competition.
Common formats for search terms are:
- [niche] job in [city], e.g. cyber marketing job in Austin
- [niche] job in [state]
- [niche] job in [country]
- remote [niche] job, e.g. remote AI job
- [niche] job in [subniche], e.g. marketing job in Product/Brand
- [seniority] [niche] job, e.g. entry level cloud engineering job
- [niche] job at [company]
- [niche] job at [company type], e.g. production manager at Indie Label
Once you've pinpointed the keywords and phrases relevant to your audience, create dedicated landing pages for each. These pages should include a headline and subheading that incorporates the search term you’d like to rank for. Plus, the respective jobs.
For Niceboard customers, it’s much easier. We automatically create category pages with the respective job listings by location, company, job type, and other custom tags. And you can manually add individual roles to each custom page.
This functionality allows for the creation of highly tailored pages such as "yourjobboard.com/designer-jobs-in-chicago".
The result? You drive more organic traffic to your board through category & location specific landing pages.
An example of using category pages
Let’s say you run a Marketing job board, like The Marketing Meetup. Your general job board landing page targets the highly competitive keyword "marketing jobs," which would be hard to rank for due to stiff competition.
Instead, you should niche down: focus on more specific keywords around "marketing jobs" so your chances of showing up on the first SERP (Search Engine Result Page) are much higher.
For example, “marketing agency jobs”, “remote marketing jobs”, etc.
Creating landing pages for each of these keywords, can dramatically increase your visibility on search engines. Instead of competing in an overcrowded market, your job board can dominate niche, high-intent searches and appear more frequently for in relevant search results.,
If there's one take-away, it's this: category landing pages rank higher, drive more organic traffic and help your job seekers find what they want quickly! And that is the power of using category landing pages for job board SEO.