Drive Traffic To Your Job Board With A Blog

In this guide, we’ll explore how a blog relevant to your niche can help drive traffic to your niche job board, establish authority in your field, and enhance the overall user experience for your job seekers and employers.

If you didn't know already: with our built-in blog platform on Niceboard, you can host your niche specific resources seamlessly on your job board site.

Benefits of a blog on your niche job board

Own the distribution channel

Your blog serves as an owned channel, meaning you have complete control over its content, distribution, and data. Unlike publishing content on social media platforms or third-party websites, your blog resides on your domain.

A blog is an organic way of driving traffic to your job board. While it’s much lower cost than paid channels, such as ads and sponsorship, it generally takes longer time to build. And the good news is: a blog is much more sustainable and will provide you with traffic over the long-term.

Drive organic traffic via SEO

Ultimately, to run a successful job board, you need relevant traffic from job seekers coming to your board. And blogs are a goldmine for organic traffic.

In the case of a job board, a blog allows you to capture organic traffic from job seekers, searching for career advice and jobs in your niche as well as employers looking for talent. When you consistently publish valuable content related to your niche, search engines take notice and will prioritize your blogposts on the search engine results page (SERP). Which, in turn, will help you drive more traffic to your board.

Bonus: The more eyes you can get on your jobs, the more leverage you have to negotiate with employers for access to your job seekers. For example, if you can show prospective employers that you have 10k monthly visitors from your niche coming to your site, you will be in a strong position to negotiate pricing.

Position your site as an authority

By providing job seekers and employers with niche-specific resources, you can position your site as an authority in your industry.

Dive deep into industry trends, career advice, and employer best practices. Or share success stories from your job board: highlight how candidates found their dream jobs or how employers discovered top talent.

These resources on your job board blog will help support job seeker careers’ and employers’ hiring success, hence improving the authority of your site.

So how do you actually get started and create a blog for your job board that is engaging, helpful and drives traffic? Here's your full guide.

1. Find the right blogging platform

Choosing the right blogging platform is crucial. Some important questions to ask yourself when evaluating different platforms:

• What features are available?
  The bare minimum are SEO optimization settings, header images, ability to add tags and a modern layout to customize to match your brand.
• What does the platform cost?
  Depending on your budget, you can choose from some solid free options or pay a recurring subscription price.
• What’s the user experience like?
  Probably one of the most important factors for keeping readers on your blog is a great user experience and a seamless transition from your job board to the blog.

If you’re using a hosted job board software like Niceboard, you can use our built in blog CMS for hosting a fully integrated and SEO optimized blog on your job board site.

2. Generate content ideas for your blog

Creating engaging and informative content for your niche job board blog requires you to know your niche and audience deeply. Luckily, niche job boards have a very specific audience—job seekers and employers—looking for very specific information—jobs or talent and career or hiring advice.

Once you come up with some initial ideas, usually a dozen more will appear. To get you started, let’s explore some approaches to generate content ideas for your job board blog.

a) Keyword research

Understanding what phrases your audience might be searching for becomes important here. You want to craft content that answers their questions and addresses their needs. Like explaining job roles, required skills, and growth prospects in your field.

Imagine you’re running a job board for the aerospace industry. Job seekers might be searching for keywords like “how to land a job in aerospace”, “networking in the aerospace industry” or “typical salaries for aerospace jobs”, while employers might look for “how to attract top talent for aerospace jobs”.

In your blog, you want to answer those exact questions with individual blogposts, such as "The 2024 guide to salary ranges in the aerospace industry". Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and help them navigate career and hiring in your niche.

These are some tools to help you identify relevant keywords and trends in your industry:

• SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner—find search volume and level of competition for your selected keyword. Get suggestions for long-tail, more specific keywords.
• AnswerThePublic—helps you brainstorm related terms and search queries that people are actually searching for.
• BuzzSumo—find out what your competition writes about for your selected keyword.
• Google Trends—track which topics are gaining or loosing popularity over time.

b) Get inspired from other job boards

Explore other niche job boards’ blogs. Even those blogs unrelated to your niche can help you come up with topics to write about. Of course, you don’t actually want to steal any of the content. Instead, you should adapt the topic to your industry or provide a fresh, updated perspective.

Some common categories for your job board blog, on job seekers are…

• job/industry insights—job roles, titles, salary ranges, industry trends, remote work
• career advancement resources—CV, LinkedIn profile, cover letter, interview questions & prep, training resources, career transitions, negotiations
• insider interviews—insights from professional in the industry, highlight uncommon career paths, guest posts
• networking—how/where/what to say, LinkedIn outreach, connecting to recruiters, personal branding, portfolio website

And if you’re writing for employers you can start with these themes:

• job market insights—salary ranges, industry trends, remote work trends, regional trends
• job listings—optimize job listings, must-haves on job listings, how to attract great talent, responsibilities
• guest interviews—insights from employers in the industry, guest posts, managing employees

For either of these topics, a detailed guide referencing related posts can be a great way to get your readers to stay on your site for longer.

c) Guests posts

Invite industry experts, recruiters, or successful job seekers to contribute guest posts in exchange for a cross-reference to the guest’s website or publication. You can experiment with different formats, such as an interview/question based article or a simple guest blogpost written by an career expert in your industry. Their unique POVs can help add diversity to your blog and attract new audiences through backlinks.

Who do you look up to in your industry?
Who might your readers like to get advice from?
Who is a pioneer in your niche?

Reach out to them and secure this very special blogpost for your audience.

d) Concrete titles to copy & adapt to your niche

These topics are a wonderful place to start out with for (almost) every niche job board.

• [niche] salary guide for 2024
• How to land your dream job in [niche]
• 5 tips for networking in [niche]
• The [niche] job scene in [city/country]
• Preparing for a [niche] job interview
• 5 skills required to get a job in [niche]
• Most in demand jobs in [niche] for 2024
• Day in the life of a [role]
• Perfecting CVs, resumes and cover letters for [niche]
• Negotiating your job offer in [niche]
• Becoming a leader in [niche]

3. Start publishing content & optimize it for SEO

Launching your blog is just the beginning; maintaining it consistently is where the magic happens.

General “rules” to keep in mind

1. Set a realistic publishing schedule—whether it’s weekly or biweekly—and stick to it. Consistency builds trust with your readers and helps you to progressively move towards your goal.
2. Content is king. And content marketing is queen. High quality, valuable content is the ONLY reasons for job seekers to read your blog posts. If you have no unique or helpful content to share, you shouldn’t bother to publish. Your laser-focus should be on creating quality over quantity.
   Repurpose the blog content for short social media snippets and let readers decide if they want to go deeper by providing a link to your blogpost.
3. When it doubt, KISS. Keep it simple and short. Let your audience, subject matter, and style dictate the length of your content. But if you can create a valuable piece of content in 500-1,000 words, that’s probably ideal.

SEO optimized content

While consistency and content matter, you can’t fully neglect the more technical side of running a blog: optimizing your pieces for search engines (or let’s be honest, it’s really just for Google).

Here’s how it works:

• Keyword optimization: Each blog post provides you with an opportunity to target specific keywords—search queries that job seekers might type into Google—relevant to the industry of your job board. Once you decide on a keyword to target, make sure to use it in your meta title and description as well as throughout the blogpost itself.
• Fresh content: Regularly updated content signal to search engines that your site is active and relevant. Including the year into titles of time-sensitive blogposts, such as salary or industry insights is a great way to show this. Google rewards freshness by ranking your pages higher.
• Links: Link to other relevant posts or resources within your blog. This improves navigation and encourages readers to explore more content. Search engines also appreciate well-structured internal linking and rich content that helps readers figure out their problem.

4. Measuring success

Attracting organic traffic via a blog can take time. So don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate results from the efforts you put into your blog. It’s a long-term game.

Saying that, it’s still important to track your blog’s performance. These two free tools will help you do just that:

• Google Analytics—monitor traffic, bounce rates, and user behavior.
• Google Search Console—track all your organic traffic and get insights into which keywords are performing well (or badly) for your blog.

And that’s blogs for niche job boards wrapped. Remember, success isn’t just about numbers—it’s about delivering value to your niche audience and driving traffic to your job board in a sustainable way.