6 ways employers use blogs to dominate Google

Why, when jobseekers and passive candidates Google work-related topics, do the same companies’ careers websites always appear at the top of page one while yours is stuck somewhere around the bottom of page seventeen? Well, the obvious answer is that they’re doing?Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?brilliantly and you’re not.?

Research tells us?that 95% of people searching online will only ever look at the first page of search engine results. So, it’s really important to turn your Google performance around. Fortunately, there’s a simple fix.?

One of the best ways you can quickly start to push your website up the?Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for various search terms is to build a blog into your website. A blog is one of the simplest methods of delivering what’s known as?on-page SEO. It increases users’ dwell time on your website’s pages, encourages them to explore multiple areas of the website (increasing their page views per session) and even encourages direct traffic (which is key to improving your SERP ranking).

We’re going to show you how the best employers use blogs to their competitive advantage.

1. Producing original, well-written content

Creating a semantic bond with your target audience of candidates and existing employees is, of course, one of the major benefits of a well-run blog. By developing blog content that taps into the mindset of your various target audiences, you can answer their career related questions, guide their personal and professional development and demonstrate just how much your workplace matches their career expectations. You become?the?go-to source for all their career-related needs.

But that’s not the only reason to produce great blog content. Here’s another serious benefit – the very creation of that semantic bond between you and your target audience is what will help drive your blog up the SERPs so that more and more relevant people see your careers website. In other words, every time the type of person you want to work for you searches for something work related, your website will be one of the ones that comes up in the first three pages of Google. But why? And how??

Well, Google Rank Brain – the algorithm that ranks websites for particular searches – actually scores websites based on what its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines call?Expertise, Authority and Trust?(EAT). That means, when your careers site delivers expert, authoritative content on a specific subject and that’s backed-up by evidence (so is trustworthy), Google recognises your site as a source of EAT for that subject and, so pushes it up the SERP for related searches.

But that content has to be original. It can’t be copied and pasted from Wikipedia or your closest competitor. It can’t be the same content regurgitated in slightly different language. Google actually scores?down?websites that plagiarise other people’s content. Finally, it has to be well-written, because Google actually scores content for readability and a website that’s full of syntactical and spelling errors will score poorly on that front.?

2. Building pillar pages into the blog

Pillar pages on a blog help employers to boost the power of their websites for candidates’?short-tail keyword searches. But what are pillar pages? Well, a pillar page on a blog is sort of like a master content page on a given subject. A broad, general overview, if you will. All future articles that are written about more specific aspects of that same subject are then hyperlinked back to the pillar page. The sheer weight of?relevant?content linking back to this master article pushes the pillar page up the Google SERP for related keyword searches. Meaning your website ranks higher and higher for your target audiences’ favourite topics. Let’s take a look in a bit more detail.

A short-tail keyword is a search term of three, or fewer, words. As such, it will usually be highly competitive, because it will likely be a general term. Imagine you run a garden centre business and you’re targeting people to work for you. One of the most highly audience-relevant but highly competitive search terms would, of course, be ‘garden centre jobs.’ Well, in this case you would make ‘garden centre jobs’ one of your pillar pages.?

The pillar page itself would be an original, authoritative, fairly lengthy (around 2,000-word) overview of the subject of ‘garden centre jobs’ and it would contain all the other short-tail keywords that pertain to that subject. Let’s say, ‘garden centre careers’, ‘garden centre vacancies’, ‘working with plants’, ‘gardening,’ and ‘gardening jobs’ just as a few examples. But the mere existence of a pillar page isn’t enough to drive it up the SERPS. You have to use the semantic breadth of your wonderful new blog as a means of doing that.

How? Well, by linking?long-tail keywords?in articles that pertain to more specific areas of working at our hypothetical garden centre back into the ‘garden centre jobs’ pillar page. Let’s just imagine that a popular (i.e. regularly searched) long-tail keyword is: ‘Top 10 outdoor jobs UK’. Well, you’d write a blog post with that very title and, within it, you would, of course, include the phrase ‘garden centre jobs’ and you would hyperlink that phrase back to the pillar page of the same name. Now let’s say that another popular long-tail keyword is: ‘what can I do with a horticulture degree?’ Guess what... That’s right – you’d write an article with that as the title and hyperlink?that?back, too, to your ‘garden centre jobs’ pillar page.?

The more articles you produce about specific, popular long-tail keywords that link back to a specific pillar page, the more you boost the SEO power of that pillar page and, therefore, the presence of your website on Google whenever someone uses one of those search terms. That’s because Google scores your website for?relevance (to audience search)?and?credibility?(i.e. thought leadership). Pillar pages are like superfood for your careers website’s on-page SEO.

3. Using keywords appropriately

Knowing how to use keywords properly is one of the easiest ways to boost the performance of your careers website in search. If you don’t know how to do this, you’re losing out on the ideal talent for your workforce.

The first thing you’re going to need to do is conduct keyword research. This is how you learn what your target audience is searching for. Start by thinking up all the possible terms that your potential candidates might be searching for. Now, put each of them into Google and scroll down to the bottom of the page, where you’ll see the other long-tail keywords similar audiences are also searching for. Now look into the keywords that people are already using to lead them to your careers website, either using Google Analytics data from your AdWords campaigns or using a dedicated tool like?SEMRUSH.

Once you’ve done that, you develop your blog’s content calendar based on creating content focused on those terms you now know your ideal candidates are looking for. The most effective way to do this is to write one article on each long-tail keyword and to link it back to the appropriate pillar page(s). (Yes, articles can be linked to more than one pillar page, if they pertain to more than one master subject.)

Whatever you do, don’t engage in the practice of keyword-stuffing, which is where you simply cram as many relevant keywords into the article as you can without context or in a way that doesn’t flow naturally and isn’t readable. Doing that will actually?hurt?your SERP ranking. Rather, write your main keyword into the first couple of sentences. Then, as you continue to craft the content, make sure that all variations on the main keyword that you’ve identified in research are used throughout. This is what’s known as?latent semantic indexing?and it’s a brilliant way to boost your website’s performance for all manner of related searches.

4. Interlinking blog content

We’ve already talked about the practice of linking your blog content internally to pillar pages, which are your?master?content pieces, if you like. Another great way of boosting the on-page SEO of your careers website with a blog is to start building other internal links. But what are they?

An internal link is, quite simply, a link from one page on your website to another page on your website. It could be from one blog post to another blog post. Or it could be from one blog post to a relevant page on your careers website, e.g. if you wrote an article pertaining to Diversity & Inclusion, you would probably hyperlink to a page on your careers site pertaining to your D&I policy.?

Internal links work in two ways...

Firstly, users find internal links incredibly useful in terms of being able to bounce around your careers site and discover new, related information, plotting their own route through your site based on the things that interest them. This is great, high-level engagement that creates that all-important semantic bond between you and your ideal candidates (or, indeed, your existing employees). It tells them that you have all kinds of interesting things to say on subjects that they find important and, thus, aligns your?employer brand?to their worldview.

Secondly, internal linking has a huge SEO benefit, in that all the clicking around the website tells Google that your content is clearly of a high quality and very valuable to the user, so it not only helps the reader; it also boosts your performance on the SERPs. And, the more blog content you develop, the greater the opportunity you have to create internal links.

5. Credible, relevant backlinking

A backlink is a hyperlink on one website that takes the user to another, different website.

We usually think of backlinks as a way of boosting a website’s?off-page SEO. In other words, getting other credible websites to post links to your careers website to boost its performance on Google (which you should definitely work on). For example, if a graduate careers publication posted a link to the graduate careers page on your website. However, your blog can actually use backlinking to?other?people’s/companies’ websites as a way of boosting?your?website’s Google performance.?

How? OK, well, if you choose authoritative backlinks that help to flesh out the meaning of your content (like we’ve done in this very article in fact – see all the links to other sites we’ve posted), this helps to boost your credibility scoring with Google. Because it shows Google that you have friends in high places, i.e. you share ideas with people and companies whose content also performs very well.?

Employers will find themselves thinking, ‘yes, but I’m not going to connect to one of my competitors’ careers websites as they’ll steal away my candidates.’ That’s not what we’re saying. Rather, it’s about building the authoritativeness of your own content with potential candidates and existing employees by referencing your claims. For example, say you wanted to write an article to help your company’s lone parent employees manage their work/life balance... You would Google something like, ‘how to improve work life balance,’ then find the top performing article on Google pertaining to that and, somewhere in your own article, you would reference this piece and provide a backlink to it.?

It’s as straightforward as that, really.

6. Producing content regularly

It’s absolutely vital that you continually produce new content in order to both boost?and?maintain?your SERP ranking. Not to mention converting your audience from potential candidates to actual applicants.

First of all, fresh content ensures that your existing audience comes back for more. Sure, they may come back to the same blog posts more than once, but new content will help to keep building that bond between your employer brand and their worldview so that, at some point during their repeated engagement with your careers site (and it’s important to track this for?Conversion Rate Optimisation), they will eventually decide to take action – email you, apply for a post, call you... or whatever the desired action.

The other, massively important, reason you have to keep producing fresh content is that search engines employ crawlers that index new content. These crawlers recognise new pages on a site and are able to see when your careers site is being updated. When they see that new content is continually being added, it improves your SERP ranking. A website that simply exists as it is, without regular updating, is far less likely to perform as well as a similar website that regularly produces fresh content – a blog is probably the most straightforward way of doing this on a careers site beyond continually refreshing your current vacancies.

Finally, producing regular content on your careers site gives you more and more opportunities to build links – both internal links and credible backlinks – which, as we now know, also powers up your Google performance. On average, it would be wise to make sure your blog is updated at least every two weeks to ensure all these optimisation and semantic goals are met, though if you have the resources, time and budget, a weekly blog, developed from a comprehensive content calendar could help to drive your site to the top of the SERPs for relevant searches within a few short months.

Nick Mitchell is the award-winning Strategic Director of Creative & Content at JupiterSparks. He has developed Employer Content Marketing strategies for the likes of RWE Renewables, Sage, Marston's and Iceland.?

Click here?to find out more about working with JupiterSparks on your Employer Content Marketing strategy.