Jobs: a competitive industry
Will Critchlow
Pro SEO Boston 2011
The scenario: we picked a couple of tough industries and put together
plans for how we would help a business compete. I am doing jobs
I’m not proposing an agency solution: I am presenting a scenario of
what I would do walking into this situation without my team behind me
So, imagine: I‟m going in-house, for 3 months, to effect changes that will
outlast me
The same is true of our estimates of what we can get done in days, weeks,
months
“We always
overestimate the
change that will occur
in the next two years
and underestimate the
change that will occur
in the next ten.”
- Bill Gates
http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/
My first task is to convince the whole company to build the right things in
the right way. I‟ve started giving this pitch to some of our larger UK clients
Why you should
love SEO
http://dis.tl/iyV9rh
There is loads of innovation happening in the recruitment space recently –
http://jobwhizz.com
There is loads of innovation happening in the recruitment space recently –
http://activeinterview.com
There is loads of innovation happening in the recruitment space recently http://www.zoho.com/recruit/lp/applicant-tracking.html
There is loads of innovation happening in the recruitment space recently http://recruiting.jobvite.com/
We‟ve even been trying our hand - https://www.hiremarshal.com/
Everyone can help
Yep, even the CEO
CEO
Operations
Sales
Marketing
Finance
• Get out there
• Be public facing
• Make sure you ask for links
• Run interference
• Manage the projects
• You guys are the best link builders
• Look for opportunities to build
relationships with strong websites
• You know what to do ;)
• Model against competitors playing
aggressively
UX
Designers
• Think about sharing as a conversion
• Delight
• Pay attention to the technical and UX input
Developers
• Learn the basics (Google “web developer SEO
cheatsheet”)
• Ask questions early
QA / testing
• Include SEO requirements
Writers
Analysts
PR
• Just write
• But remember to choose search words over jargon
• “Michael Jackson dead” vs “king of pop snuffs it”
• Share your insights throughout the organisation
• Include bloggers
• Run events that get you links
Stand for something: e.g. “employing our way out of an economic
downturn”
You’d have to mean it: online training like http://www.peepcode.com and
post-placement support like http://dis.tl/jmaGJu
Support
successful
candidates
Fund training
Not only do you stand for something: people who believe in your
message are aligned with promoting it
Go and do this: give this presentation to your boss, your clients, your
clients‟ developers, your developers http://dis.tl/iyV9rh
But seriously, more
tips please
Learn from things
others struggle with
Jobs typically expire: leading to nasty IA challenges
Encourage perma-jobs: give companies a way to create “always hiring”
adverts to help work around the expiring content issue. Re-use URLs
Jobs are listed on many sites: your UGC ends up not unique
Offer discounts for exclusivity: at least exclusivity of copy if not the
whole job (seems common in the real estate market)
It’s really hard to deserve to rank: category pages (“XXXX jobs in
YYYY”) are the natural candidates, but they easily become lists of links
I tweeted a question: “what (apart from the obvious) would you want to
see on a „journalism jobs in Boston‟ page?”
Rich visualizations: see Tableau Public http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2010/01/60years
Job-seekers don’t (generally) tell the world what they’re doing and
so are unlikely to form the basis of a community
From a discussion on metafilter about changes to digg
More likely: Job seekers are the product – job advertisers are your
community. Use persona modelling for your link building
Which referrals actually lead to hires? A lot of money is spent
advertising jobs. Job analytics and affiliate programs would WIN
We announced
that we were
hiring in NYC
And learn from others’
successes too
@dsottimano in the London office built a prototype tool for finding SERPs
competitors http://dis.tl/matgaQ
Analyse a competitor’s link success: by section of their site / tactic
http://seogadget.co.uk/what-are-my-most-linked-to-subfolders/
…and their search visibility success segmented by the same things
This helps you find tactics to investigate and build boss- / client-friendly
arguments
Find the gaps: using this technique, we found that white label jobs boards
are successful, but no-one‟s providing them to .edu or UK magazine sites
13 things you can
actually go and do
Use developers for link building: one of my favorite tactics. Developers
can create amazing stuff incredibly quickly when working from scratch
Use developers for link building: they can even build useful stuff. For
example this calculator for take-home salary after tax: http://dis.tl/jS8vMC
Continuous deployment: so simple, a VC can do it [@fredwilson].
Imagine what this does for SEO
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allspaw/5436215259/
PR: all very well, but what would you actually do? See e.g.
http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/
Cultivate
relationships
Connect to a hook
Hold offline
events
Do research
(never “surveys”)
Break news
Does your CEO know your goals? Sometimes CEOs can get links from
the golf course
This is what Rand
does most days
Hire a data scientist: essentially anyone who finds this funny. Check out
presentations by @hmason at bit.ly e.g. http://dis.tl/iq1SCl
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/06/02/im-in-ur-quantum-box/
Instil design values: everyone should cultivate an eye for design and
designers should stay up to date with the latest trends
Create a company-wide swipe file of cool / interesting stuff
Incentivize API development: do this in the jobs space, fund start-ups,
incubate cool ideas e.g. http://www.codeeval.com
PageRank? That’s a good idea! What if you rank your jobs by the same
signals you want your site to acquire: links, social signals, referral traffic?
What determines this
sort order?
Implementation details: can‟t use raw mR of your pages because it
won‟t be updated soon enough. Use other signals that correlate
What if? Everyone who signed up to list a job got access to guides on how
to market their jobs online?
Provide resources: evergreen content is more powerful than you think –
social media is helping it spread further than ever
Hire a community manager: reach out and say thank you. T-shirts rock:
http://dis.tl/mGiOXz, http://dis.tl/laIDOj, http://dis.tl/mzc2TP
“Also, we've got some Geckoboard t-shirts and I'd love to send one your way if you'd be
interested. Just let me know your address and what colour and size you would like; we
have S, M, L and XL in Black, Orange, Green, Blue and Red.”
Get on the social train: http://www.punchtab.com/tour
Director
> [email protected]
> twitter.com/WillCritchlow
Distilled
> www.distilled.co.uk
Videos are now available
of our #linklove
conference in London and
New Orleans:
www.distilled.net/store
Rand tweeted a slide about my fashion sense, so I thought I‟d just add this
slide: “My dad beat Rand Fishkin”