SEO and PPC strategies aren’t just for Internet marketers anymore. Large organizations are using Internet search and SEO to increase visibility and drive web traffic to company career pages. No longer are job boards the first place job seekers look to find employment opportunities. Search engines and social media are the top two places job seekers visit to find work. They are either searching for a specific job in a specific city or they are going to a companies social media page to find job opportunities.

With search becoming one of the most popular means of looking for jobs, recruiters need to learn how to effectively use PPC in order to place the right candidate into jobs faster. Earlier this week we talked about learning to be versatile in your job role and this is a beneficial skill for recruiters to learn to have a step up on competition in their field.

Recruiting Efforts

If you’re a noob in the SEO/PPC game, this image shows you a breakdown of where SEM/PPC/SEO comes into play on a search results page.

• Search Engine Marketing: This relates to the process of gaining traffic from visibility on search engines.

• Pay Per Click: This is an Internet marketing model that directs traffic to a specific website. The text is usually short and concise using specific targeted keywords.

• Search Engine Optimization: This relates to the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s natural or paid search results.

Why is SEO & PPC important for recruiters?

When posting on job boards you’re basically paying for placement. That means you pay to place your ad on their board with absolutely no guarentee that anyone will see or respond. You can invest 300-500 dollars in placing your ad with no guarantee in return. Sometimes you get great response and sometimes you don’t. With PPC you’ll be able to guarantee that your ad is shown with keywords that you picked and place specifically to fill a certain job position.

When people search for a job and it’s your job to fill that position you want your posting to be at the very top. The chart below shows that the first posting not only gets triple the traffic as the second result, but the click-through rate is also almost triple. The lesson learned from this chart is that you want to be #1. Being on the first page of Google’s search results accounts for about 89% of total search traffic.

The numbers don’t lie. Recruiters must invest in SEO & PPC in order to make their jobs more searchable. Creating targeted landing pages with specific keywords will greatly increase your chance of being ranked higher within Google’s search results. In Part 1 of this 3 part series we’ve highlighted the importance of investing in SEO and PPC for recruiters and the statistics that prove its important to not only invest, but to start if your company isn’t already budgeting for it in the New Year.

Do you already invest?

Do you invest in SEO or PPC techniques? SEO goes beyond the normal picking a random keyword you want to rank for and placing it on your website. It goes deeper into custom tag tiles, meta descriptions, contextual optimization, targeted optimization, efficient landing pages, and much more! Let us know.

Part 2 of 3 – January, 16, 2013

Join us on 1/16 for the next part in our series where we will go over how to write effective PPC ads and how to save money in doing it yourself. Sure you can go out and pay a company mountains of cash, but if you want to show your employer that you are an irreplaceable part of the team, spend some time with us in learning how to write effective PPC campaigns in Part 2.