The SEOs are coming!
Like Jobs2Web and Optijob before it, SEO 4 Jobs selected the ERE conference to showcase its wares for helping employers take advantage of search engine optimization tactics. The service is the brainchild of Johnathon Duarte, head guy at GOjobs.com.
I caught up with Duarte at the show to learn more:
The company offers free webinars to get acquainted with the product, as well as a free site analysis if you have over 5,000 employees. A sample site can be found here. Top Ten rankings are guaranteed.
Company microsites, dubbed “mini-Monsters” by some, follow a similar playbook to the competition: Set-up subdomain, create anchor text-rich internal links, get pages indexed and hopefully ranked for targeted candidate traffic.
I’ve had more than a handful of conversations with Duarte over the years and feel pretty comfortable he “gets it.” A major advantage SEO4Jobs will have over Jobs2Web (what’s with the numbers in the URLs?), mentioned in the interview, is a fundamental understanding of backlinks and their impact on rankings.
J2W does a poor job establishing backlinks to its microsites, which is very important in how search engines establish trust with those sites. If SEO4Jobs can establish quality links into its properties, they have a much greater chance of ranking for competitive terms versus tail terms which garner fewer clicks by comparison.
Another wild card for the company is price.
Frankly, setting up these sites isn’t difficult as long as you have the data. Every ATS and job board I know of can do this with a little fortitude. (Hell, your favorite vertical job search engine may already be getting your jobs into Google.) And if it means retaining a client for their core business, they may even do it for free.
As a result, the cost of simply getting your job descriptions onto Google is fading. Value lies in ranking well for competitive terms (which the job boards fight over on an ongoing basis), attracting passive candidates and offering value-adds or tackling progressive initiatives, such as optimizing video. Time will tell if these services can achieve such things.
Simply getting past the velvet rope and into Google ain’t gonna get it done.
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April 7th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Cheezhead,
Great interview with Jon Duarte. I’ve known Jon for about 6 or 7 years and he definitely understands how the recruiting industry should be using SEO and backlinks. The fact that he is willing to guarantee top 10 rankings or you don’t get charged (other than the set-up fee), really puts his money where his mouth is. Very few vendors in the recruiting space are willing to stand behind their product with such conviction. I’d like to see some sort of SEO and ‘backlink-off’ between SEO 4 jobs, HRSEO (Cheezhead) and Jobs 2 web. The winner gets a large gold championship belt (a la Boxing or Pro Wrestling) to be worn and displayed at future trade shows. Talk about good times…
April 8th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Nick,
I guess I’ll have to start lifting weights to be able to proudly hold that big old belt over my head… think you can help with some “Hans and Frans” training for me?
JD