Recruitment SEO = Mobile, Social Media and Email Recruitment |
19.12.2011
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In 2012 expect all vendors to start a heavy push towards mobile, social media and in all instances expect the humble email to make a dramatic return (if you haven't been shoved in that direction already)!
How is Mobile Linked to SEO?
Mobile is linked to SEO, Social Media Optimisation (SMO), Social Media Marketing (SMM) and just about everything else through the ways in which mobiles in the hands of users, impact you and your ability to gain the best returns from any web marketing plan , a summary overview of which follows.
The Millennial Job Seeker (16-24 yr olds) is joined at the hip to their mobile. If you have no mobile presence, you're just communicating, you're not in tune with Millennials. The same applies for web savvy members of Gen X, Gen Y, etc. Subject to the recruitment markets you work within, expect to see your traffic ratios change based upon the age and tech savvy nature of your users in relation to mobile communications.
What to do About Mobile?
In the first instance, re-read the aforementioned and make sure you know your market. Don't go mobile for vanity, go mobile for sanity. I recommend to my clients that if we can potentially see 20% or more of their traffic coming from mobile users, then it's time to go mobile.
However, don't forget to also take into account the bounce rate of your mobile users. In most cases we have seen that the bounce rates for sites with no mobile presence tends to be around 60-80%. That is quite a negative in the eyes of the search engines, one which can pull down your overall authority as a site.
How to go about Mobile?
Mobile comes in three main forms. Mobile Enabled, Stand-Alone Mobile and Mobile Apps.
Mobile Enabled - Basically on your present site you can simply add some more pages via your content management system and have the page templates made in a mobile enabled format.
The pros are you retain one website and can mobile enable some, all or none of its features. Google spiders can be told ‘here are our mobile pages' for indexing and the long term simplicity of this solution means your costs and technical issues will be lower.
The cons of this solution are your content management system may not permit this and/or your present vendor may not want to offer you this option as they only have stand-alone solutions available. Some vendors will tell you that you can do less with SEO on mobile enabled pages, but that means they just don't know SEO and/or they simply want to sell you something else.
Stand-Alone Mobile - Basically it's a second website made to run and support your Mobile web presence. The page template will, in most cases, look identical to those used on sites that have mobile enabled pages. So in visual terms it might be hard for you to tell the difference.
The pros are you get a second bite at the apple and can run your Mobile presence in a totally unique way compared to your traditional site. To repeat my advice on SEO, some will claim stand-alone can be tuned better for Google's mobile search engine, but the reality is these people just don't know SEO. Only if the content is to be extremely far removed from the content on your standard site could you position the Mobile site in a better way, as you would then be ranking it for entirely different content.
The cons are simple, it costs more to make and run a second site than it does to mobile enable your existing site. If you are in the market for stand-alone mobile sites expect to pay no more than £1995 to £2995, if you do then you're paying for the suppliers Ferrari, because there is really nothing complicated to these solutions.
Mobile Apps - Here the vanity vs. sanity really hits the road and you need to be very, very careful. The Millennials do love an App and so do the web savvy members of Gen X, Y and so on. However, the consumption and subsequent disposal of most Apps happens at very rapid pace. Apps live a very short time, in the mindset of many users they can be worth as little as 30 seconds of distraction. The percentage of Apps that get downloaded, used once and then never used again is immense.
Think information/usage value. Perm hires who change jobs every 3 years are not likely to dust off your App next time they job seek, unless it has been supplying them with resources other than your jobs in the past 3 years that they have found useful.
Temp hires fair better, theoretically, as the time line for interaction with your App is going to be shorter, but again this is a generalisation which will not fit all temp markets. Contractors on 3, 6, 9, 12 and ever rolling contracts also may not show you any loyalty if all your App does is push them your jobs.
Mobile Apps are heavily reliant upon making themselves useful long term, that means data and resources need to be pushed/connected to them. In the short term, Mobile Apps that have incomplete tools, like you cannot apply for a job as you don't have your CV on your mobile, are a notorious waste of time and are only tolerated by those who use them as a novelty, a novelty which will wear thin soon.
Social Media Recruitment
So with the briefest hints at data and information strategies, we are neatly tying things up with social media & emails.
In this article we cannot do justice to this subject as we have not the space, complaints to ED, so for now I will say that in January we will follow up with the next instalment. For now you need to know that your Recruitment SEO (and in fact your entire online recruitment strategy) is not complete just because you tweet your jobs and publish them on your Facebook or blast them to LinkedIn groups. Social Recruitment is NOT putting your jobs on Twitter.
Social Recruitment is about putting out engaging content that builds rapport and communities amongst your potential clients and customers. For that you need a dedicated resourced in-house team/a new supplier. Then expect all roads to lead to email at some point, being social does not work without email, period.
