Harnessing the power of search engine marketing for recruitment

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) has traditionally been the realm of businesses trying to attract customers to their site, either for online ecommerce transactions or as a form of lead generation. The industry has grown from a small “cottage” industry just 4 or 5 years ago to a multi-million dollar booming industry in 2008. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (Australia) search accounted for 44% of the total online ad spend, with $527,250,000 being spent in the financial year ending June 2007. Clearly, advertisers have harnessed the power of search to attract people to their websites.

Classifieds accounted for 27% of the total online ad spend. Recruitment continues to lead this category, followed by real estate and automotive. This indicates that recruiters and HR departments are still relying heavily on job boards as a way of attracting candidates.

The likes of Seek, MyCareer and CareerOne all realized at an early stage that search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! were going to provide the majority of their traffic and hence acted upon it. As an example try searching for “IT jobs” – the top three “sponsored” and natural search results are all job boards. According to some research released by AOL, the top 3 natural search results attract almost 70% of the traffic for that keyword.

So which is best? PPC or SEO? Both - depending on your situation. PPC has the benefit of being virtually immediate, i.e. as soon as your campaign has been built, your ads will start to show almost immediately and start receiving clicks. The main downside is usually the cost. PPC works on an auction system, so to be in the top paid position it may cost several dollars per click. Also remember you are competing with the large job boards for the same keywords – they tend to have very large budgets so they can afford to outbid you. According to Google the average spend for a job board is approximately $200,000 per month*, that’s just on Google! Another potential issue with PPC is the trust factor – i.e. if you have to pay to be there, is the person searching likely to trust you?

Natural rankings, achieved through SEO tend to be favoured by most companies, however most don’t realize the amount of work involved to achieve high rankings for large traffic keywords like “IT jobs” or “mining jobs”. As previously stated, the top three natural search results receive the lion’s share of the traffic, so everyone is fighting for those spots. SEO tends to be much cheaper in the long run as clicks are essentially “free” once the rankings are achieved. A fundamental first step in SEO is establishing what keywords you want to rank for. There are several ways of doing this, but one way is to use your PPC data. From your PPC campaign you’ll be able to tell which keywords delivered clicks to your site and even which keywords generated enquiries or potential candidates.

Another benefit to consider are the branding opportunities offered by both PPC and SEO. People tend to associate credible rankings with credible companies. So for example, if your site comes up number one for “mining jobs” people will think you’re the specialist leading company for that keyword. In this scenario combining SEO and PPC has a multiplier effect, so if you are in the favourable position of already ranking number one in the natural search results for a particular keyword, it’s advisable to also bid to position one in the paid results as this almost guarantees you’ll get the click.

As most companies still haven’t taken up this opportunity both in regards to PPC and SEO for recruitment, now is the time to act and focus on your PPC and SEO efforts.