Recruitment SEO made simple. Right so you know you need to be found….Some quick basics first, to help you understand your Meta tags from your backlinks, your analytics from your keywords…

Recruitment SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - is all about getting the right volume and quality of people (traffic) to a specific part of your site through search engines, by the use of “natural” or “organic” search results. Below is an example of the “organic” search results in Google.

How?

2 ways…

1. On page Optimisation

these are the changes made to your sites’ pages, so the search engine indexes them correctly and they show up against that person’s specified keywords. This includes Meta tag creation, keyword density analysis and anchor text editing (and yes, we’ll come to these in a minute). It can also include hierarchical and structural changes as well as technical changes involving the size of your pages and server up times (not lost you yet, have I?).

Meta tags are the HTML tags that provide information about the web page and can be found in a web pages source code. Meta tags may contain information about what the page is about with the most important tags being the Title tag and Meta description tag which Google often uses as the text you see displayed in the Google organic search results.

Keywords these are all of the keywords (geddit?) you need throughout your site and on each specific page that will inform the search engines how relevant your site is against your search terms. The Keyword Density is how many of those keywords and their related words are on each page.

Google PageRank™ is a link analysis algorithm developed by Google that assigns a weighted score for each web page. The score ranges from 0 (poorly assessed by Google) to 10 (a hugely trusted and credible site). Some say it isn’t used much now, but hey, it’s always better to be higher ranked than lower, so keep an eye on this.

2. Off Page Optimisation

These are all the activities you do on other web pages that build up a level of trust through the search engines. If another site thinks enough of you to link to you, then this shows you have a credible site. It’s sort of like a recommendation and these recommendations are called Backward Links

The trick comes in putting all of this together, working out the right keywords, ensuring the technology is compatibility and that is where we can come in!

We hope this information is useful. If you would like any more advice on your SEO, PPC or would just like to outsource the whole process please get in touch. You will find a myriad of ways to get in touch on our contact us page.

Facebook advertising can be done by absolutely anyone. You can easily create an ad and put it up on Facebook. The problem is that absolutely anyone can do it and hardly anyone does it properly. Not many people take enough time and don’t know the techniques to actually make Facebook advertising work. 4 out of 5 people who try Facebook advertising don’t use it again. On the other hand spending on Facebook has risen 10 fold in the last year. This is mainly companies that can afford to spend a lot of money using Facebook and can afford the best tools  for optimising their campaigns.

If you take the time to understand how people use Facebook and carefully monitor your advertising campaign you too can yield excellent results. We create Facebook advertising campaigns for multiple clients and have account managers working every day monitoring these campaigns to make sure they are successful for the client.

Here are our tips on getting Facebook advertising to work for you:

1. Test Multiple images, titles and ad copy – Most people will make 3 or 4 ads and just put them live on Facebook. We would recommend testing many different images and different ad copy and combining these to see which actually work. This way you will end up with a lot more ads live on Facebook. This will not only allow you to find out what your audience responds to but also will improve the longevity of your ads as your audience will be seeing many different ads and won’t get bored as quickly.

2. Have a call to action in every ad - Give Facebook users a reason to click on your ads. For example if you are advertising a job make sure you have “Apply Now!” at the end of your ad copy.

3.  Be bold - Facebook advertising is like billboard advertising, users aren’t looking for your ads so you need ads which they will take notice of. Use colourful images and use concise direct language. Try not to use marketing speak, your users will appreciate this and will be more likely to click on your ads.

4. Use Micro and Macro targeting for your campaigns –  We always run a broad targeted campaign married with  smaller highly specific, targeted campaigns for each of our clients. We find this greatly improves the CTR (Clickthrough Rate) of their ads. Below is a diagram showing the main differences between Macro Facebook campaigns and Micro Facebook campaigns.

5. Assign different targeting options to individual ads – To help monitor who clicks on our ads we actually individually create each ad with seperate targeting. For example we will have an ad aimed at a male between the ages of 18-24 who lives in London. We will also have another ad aimed at a female aged of 18-24 who lives in London. By being very specific with every ad we can stop ads that don’t perform and can tell our clients which demographics have been unsuccessful. Ideally we would recommend not only using different targeting on each ad but also simultaneously trialling different images, titles and copy. This will mean you end up with hundreds of ads in each campaign but it is by far the best way to structure and monitor an advertising campaign on Facebook.

We understand this can get complicated so we have included a digram below that demonstrates how we structure our campaigns (Click on the image for a larger copy).

Click me to see me bigger

6. Don’t be afraid to stop ads running – We are constantly pausing ads that don’t gain impressions or clicks. If an ad is not working pause it as it will mean more budget for those ads that do receive clicks.

7. Closely Monitor your Clickthrough Rate -  Your Clickthrough Rate is calculated by dividing the number of impressions of a specific ad by the number of times the ad gets clicked. If your CTR begins to decrease, you may want to consider targeting a different target group or switching your advertisement. All advertisements will eventually lose their effectiveness. Your ability to stop them before this point will determine how long your campaign will be successful for.

8. Track Conversions – If you are driving traffic to your website you will normally want users to perform an action when they get there, known as a conversion. This could be  buying a product or registering for a job update. Facebook has their own tracking tools so you can track these conversions. It will mean inserting some code onto your website but believe us, it is worth it. If done properly conversion tracking allows you to calculate whether your advertising is converting into results. We would recommend having a look a Facebook’s tracking guide for more information on how conversion tracking works on Facebook.

Facebook advertising can tell you a lot about your target audience and be a great advertising solution when done properly. These are just some of the techniques we use to make Facebook work for our clients. If you would like any more advice or would just like us to take care of the whole process for you please Get in Touch.

Here’s  a recent case study of a project we did for one of our Recruitment SEO clients we thought you may be interested in. If you want to find out more about our Recruitment SEO services please get in touch.

Project Objective

The Synergy Group provides recruitment, training and consultancy solutions to public and private sector employers across the UK. Synergy Group needed to raise traffic to their website through relevant “organic searches” on Google and the major search engines.

The Synergy Group also wanted to improve their internal understanding of how search engines work through effective training and documentation.

Search Natives’ Solution

Search Natives’ SEO project focused on making sure candidates found the right page on Synergy for their job search. This included:

1. A Technical Audit for the Synergy website with advice as to how best structure the site for search engines
2. Keyword Research to ensure that the terms being searched related to the relevant website pages and used this information to track effectiveness against competitors
3. Link Building – any site is well rendered on the search engines needs relevant links pointing back to their site
4. Manual Optimisation – using the Keyword Research to make sure every page is correctly rendered using the relevant terms and structure

What we did?

Highlighted the technical factors that were affecting how Synergy’s website ranked on the different search engines with best practice implementation recommendations. As well as providing comparative data and analysis of Synergy’s website against its main competitors’ websites with specific areas for improvement.

We also improved Synergy’s link profile. Search Natives used different techniques to provide Synergy with a list of relevant, high quality sites that could link back to Synergy’s site.

Provided recommendations to ensure Synergy’s website was optimised around relevant keywords, writing properly formatted keyword rich title, description and H1 tags for their main pages.  We also provided an Excel document containing the new tags and a document explaining how these changes should be implemented.

All followed up with easy to understand documentation and training.

The results

Whilst Synergy is still in the process of implementing our recommendations, we’ve proven that even the small changes can make a difference. As well as growing from Page rank 4 to 5 within an incredibly short period of time, our work has dramatically increased their relevant traffic and candidate conversion rates. So much so, they kindly said the following…

What they said:

“Search Natives extensive knowledge of recruitment SEO has provided us with the tools to affect our website’s search rankings. By using their expertise we have improved our site from a technical point of view and can directly attribute better and more relevant search traffic as a result of their great work.”

Thought you all would be interested in a recent case study we received from one of our Further Education Colleges we work with as an advertising partner….If you want to know more, you know how to get in touch…

Campaign Objectives:

Brighton & Hove City College provides vocational courses and training to people in Brighton, Hove and the surrounding area. With a limited budget, the objective of their campaign with Net Natives was to increase the applications for multiple hard to fill full and part-time courses.

Net Natives Solution:

Targeted Facebook advertising campaigns.

Brighton & Hove City College’s target audience use Facebook every day. It’s the perfect platform to promote City College’s courses.

For each of the target courses Net Natives designed multiple adverts with varying ad copy and images. This was done to test what images worked and to ensure Facebook users did not get bored of seeing the same advert.

The targeting for each course was individually researched so that only the most relevant users saw the ads. For example, City College wanted to promote a Jazz Dance course so Net Natives specifically targeted those users who had registered an interest in dance on their profiles.Net Natives only targeted those Facebook users living in Brighton, Hove and local towns. By only showing their ads to a specific audience City College only received clicks from people they knew should respond positively to the courses on offer.

Each course campaign was monitored and edited to maximise the effectiveness of the advertising. At the end of the campaign Net Natives provided an end of campaign report demonstrating how many clicks were received for each course as well as other useful information such as the number of clicks for each advert design type received to feed back in to future marketing campaigns.

The Statistic and results

What they said

“Net Natives have proven the concept for us for effective Facebook advertising. We have been particularly impressed with the level of strategic input the Net Natives team have provided to ensure the campaign met our objectives. For us the return on investment has been such that we will use this advertising medium as one of our primary resources, with Net Natives as our go to agency.”

You will find your job online, but here are some basic precautions you need to take to make sure that no one steals your identity online. Your CV contains a lot of personal information, protect yourself when job hunting online.

For more information on how to create the perfect CV click here but make sure that you do not provide unnecessary personal details about yourself on your CV.

Information you should include:

• Your postal address
• Your home and mobile telephone numbers
• Your education, skills and professional experience
• Your desired salary
• Details about your past and present employers – including whether or not you’d be happy for them to be approached for a reference about you before you are invited to an interview.
• Details about your past and present achievements

Never give out the following details unless you know that they are going to a genuine employer and they personally request them:

• Your passport number
• National Insurance number
• Driving licence
• Credit card or banking details
• Taxation references

There is also no obligation for you to provide information like your date of birth or age, gender, hair or eye colour, weight, height, marital status and the number of children you have. You should be extra cautious if you hear about job opportunities through unexpected emails. Stop and think about whether it’s likely this person will be contacting you and do some investigation into the organisation or individual to check they are legitimate before responding.

Never respond to phishing emails, which will give the impression that they are from legitimate organisations, but aren’t in reality. Many of them will ask for your user names and passwords or other private information.

Always remember not to worry too much. There are loads of great job hunting tools online for keeping you up to date with the latest job opportunities and thousands of new roles are advertised each day. Why not use LinkedIn for job hunting or have a look at the major UK job boards.

As always, of course, Net Natives would always recommend advertising broadly across the major UK job boards. But we’re an online recruitment company, NOT a job board reseller – we want our clients to engage with the best talent, directly. We always challenge our clients to do more. We say, ”Why not compete against the job boards directly…!”

If over 75% of job seekers turn to Google at the start of their job search and “Jobs” is consistently one of their top search terms, it should be pretty obvious why you would want to back up a job board advertising campaign with an effective Search Engine Marketing Campaign using Google. Coupled with effective online recruitment advertising, it is perfect for specific or ongoing recruitment campaigns. And here’s why…

• It’s a completely targeted approach – the correct advertising will only appeal to those who have searched for your requirements
• Geo-targeting –only showing ads to candidates in your geographic location. But…you could show your ads to those in one town or the whole of the UK (worth considering for contract roles or if you think people would relocate).
• Drive direct traffic to your own site – Cut out all middle men (especially the recruiters). You have control of the look and feel of your careers site and candidates can quickly find out what you’re all about.
• Promote your company as well as the recruitment – Candidates may also be your customers so even if you don’t employ them they may buy your products, or just talk about you to their mates. Win win!
• You set the budget – You never have to worry about overspend when you have established an effective budget and bidding level.
• Only pay for relevant clicks – You only pay for those who have actually clicked on your ads. Your ads could be seen millions of time but you only pay for those who look on your site, ones who want to apply.
• It’s cost effective – By only paying for relevant clicks and being very targeted with your advertising, if done effectively, Google could become your lowest cost per hire model.
• Turn it off when you want – Adwords can be stopped with a click. You can also edit your ads and keywords during a campaign and Adwords won’t charge you a penny extra.
• Be completely specific – You can keep your Adwords costs down by bidding on very specific terms. For example “C# developer job Brighton” would only cost you 4p per click as it’s so specific.
• Be creative and have fun with the adverts – As Adwords ads can be edited in real time and the costs are so low, you can experiment with lots of different Ad copy. Why not try emotive and factual copy to see how each performs. You can then use the feedback to improve your other marketing.
• Target “passive” job seekers - don’t just focus on jobs or recruitment. Think about how your ideal person would engage with searches and terms and bid for those terms as well.
• Target your competitors – Not everyone agrees with this, but it is within the “rules” to bid on your competitors keywords. This way if candidates are searching for jobs with your competitors you can make sure your company appears above them in the paid search results. Cheeky, I know, but it works.

All well and good. But be warned -  ALWAYS make sure that your advert relates to the landing page you are driving traffic to and make it easy for candidates to apply when they are there.

Right, here endeth the lesson. If anyone wants to talk to me about recruitment PPC campaigns in more detail or has more comments to add feel free.  

If Facebook advertising works (and it does), why aren’t more business using it as an effective advertising or recruitment tool? I’m hoping that this article will share what www.netnatives.co.uk know and help build any companies out there considering using Facebook as a tool to build better campaigns. If you’ve got any questions or further suggestions, as always contact me.  Oh and I am not going to talk about company profiles or social media interaction in this post, will save that for later (needless to say, if you haven’t already begun building your company profile page on Facebook – get cracking).

Firstly some quick stats; these stats are always changing (for the better), but, in a nutshell, Facebook can rightly be called a phenomenon with 200 million active users, 18 million of those return daily. And its popularity is spread across all age groups; 12% of users are aged between 13-17, 29% aged 18 to 24, 30% aged 25- 34 and 29% aged 35 and above.  This demographically even split makes Facebook an amazing prospect for business advertising.

How does it work? It’s like Google…on steroids…

We all know Google Adwords Pay Per Click Platform enables advertisers to choose what keywords their ads would display against in Google search. Facebook have taken this a step further, enabling advertisers to only show ads to those targeted users who would be interested based on the detailed information captured by each user. Like Google, you are only charged when that relevant person clicks on your ad. Turn it off and on when you need. Simple.

The key to Facebook advertising is knowing and understanding your target demographic and making sure you reach them with adverts that resonate and are relevant.

So the first action is to work out who you want to reach and build a targeted campaign against that demographic. Below is an extract example of a targeted campaign to increase awareness and applications for a journalism course at a further education college we were advising. You can see how easy it is to target your campaign against age, gender, location, workplace, education and interests.

a snapshot of what targeting information you should include

Think about the possibilities here for who you want to reach and how they would register their interests on Facebook – the opportunities are endless. Think about the recruitment potential (both direct and branding), being able to direct specific campaigns to users who are working at a company you would like to target (Call Centre staff working for a competitor in an area, for example). Or a graduate campaign for specifc universities which have a distinctive talent pool. What about solicitors who have roots in Liverpool, but are finishing their training contract in London…

And don’t forget this is global. We recently ran a campaign for a global translation business that needed to hire Chinese translators in China. Through effective targeting we were able to pinpoint an ad to the 240 registered users who had registered their interests as “translator” or derivative – to ENORMOUS success…

But, and this is the real meat of the post, make sure that your campaign is relevant and resonates!

Here  are 5 key pointers to remember when designing your Facebook advertising campaigns:

1. Make Your Ads Campaign Specific.

So many businesses make the mistake of creating a general business ad with details of their company as a whole. The more specific the ad, the easier it will be for the viewer to decide whether it is relevant to them. Increasing relevant and cutting out irelevant clicks. It will also allow you to more clearly specify your key demographic i.e. age group, gender, interests.

Create an ad for each specific product/service you provide.

For example: For a Further Education College, instead of creating a general college ad they should create ads for their separate courses e.g.  a  journalism course ad with specific details about that course.

This leads onto the what you do with people when they get onto your site…

2. Think Carefully About The Ad Landing page

You could have the best ad in the world but if the viewer isn’t taken to a landing page that matches the ad copy , they’ll lose interest. If you are recruiting land on the relevant work for us page. If you are a college looking to increase enrolments, land on the right course page.

3. Make Your Ads Emotive

Create a reason for the user to click on your ad. Remember you are targeting ads to their interests. Ask your viewer a question.

For example: A further education college may ask “Do you want to be a journalist?” when alluding to their journalism course.

Making bold statements that grab the viewer’s attention will always gain you more clicks.

Be daring as well as informative with your ad copy and you’ll definitely get a higher click through rate.

4. Choose a Memorable Picture

Unlike plain Google text ads, Facebook allows you to include a picture with your ad. Your company logo won’t always gain maximum clicks. Good pictures of people get more clicks than anything else, but images that closely relate to your product are always a good choice.

5. Be Competitive and Realistic with your Bids

Although quite self-explanatory it is important to take note that you can run your advertisement for a specific time period and can specify the date and time the campaign starts and finishes. Impressions are the number of times your advert is displayed on facebook. I would always recommend paying per click instead of impression as this should be more cost effective.

Ensure your daily budget and cost per click is both competitive and realistic. It may take a certain amount of trial and error to gauge the right bid per click and you should start at facebook’s suggested bid when you first start listing your ad.

Why wouldn’t any business consider this. What stops companies wanting to engage in this direct approach?

Time and inclination. Look, everything I have put up here does take time and you need to put the effort in to get the results (or outsource to a reputable partner who will save you time and will be transparent in their charges). Whether you do this yourself or work with a partner (mmmm and maybe I know someone who could help…), I hope this post has helped focus on the potentials .

So to sum up, Facebook advertising can be extremely cost effective and a valuable advertising platform if used with thought and care. Don’t be afraid to be imaginative when writing your ad copy and choosing your picture and monitor your click through rate carefully as this will be a good indicator for how well your ads are performing and how much you should bid per ad. If you want more detailed help with setting up a facebook advertising campaign or want information on our flat fee recruitment service please get in touch.

So I have already written about “what is flat fee recruitment”, but I thought should explain 10 simple reasons why flat fee recruitment should be considered for ALL vacancies.

1. The best candidates are all online. The flat fee service is suitable for pretty much EVERY SINGLE TYPE OF VACANCY. But, if you don’t want to contact people who know how to use a computer, flat fee recruitment is not for you.

2. It is a fraction of the cost (up to 90%) of traditional recruitment methods

3. You can hire as many candidates who are relevant as you wish as no extra cost

4. We use a wider network of relevant job boards and online databases than most recruitment companies

5. It is low cost recruitment, MUCH cheaper than buying the ads from job boards on an individual basis, as we have pre bought the services in bulk.

6. We know which sites are relevant and will bring the best candidates, you don’t have to rely on the sales pitches of individual job boards

7. You will not be inundated with CVs as we manage all responses and only send you the relevant candidates

8. All filtering and sourcing is done MANUALLY by real humans, based on the criteria we work with you to create

9. It is not just job board advertising reselling, we add REAL value through our expertise in the recruitment process. The process is EXACTLY as detailed as any traditional recruitment

10. Our unique guarantee means that we will not rest until you have successfully hired that perfect person.

Oh and you will never have to speak to a recruitment consultant again!

(OK that’s 11)

Real quick one this, but thought I would share a little about social bookmarking which I personally use and always recommend to clients as part of their social media strategy. All it does, is simply allow you to save your bookmarks online, tag them with relevant keywords and share them with others (hence the “social” part).

My favourites are hardly unique:

• Delicious – for all websites Net Natives’ Delicious Page.

and

• Digg – a social bookmarking site designed specifically for news items. Users can vote on different links (“digging”) and the most “dugg” stories will appear on the site’s home page. e.g. Take a look at Net Natives’ Digg Page.

Delicious and Digg are just 2 of hundreds of social bookmarking sites including Technorati, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Ma.gnolia to name but a few. We’d recommend playing around with different sites as each has a different slant.

Why should you use social bookmarking?

1. It allows you to view your favourite sites from anywhere in the world, as your bookmarks are on a website and not stored on your computer’s hardware

2. They are fantastic for search engine optimisation. Google’s search algorythm takes into account what websites your site is listed on and how popular those sites are. As websites like Digg and Delicious are very popular, having your business site bookmarked on these sites should improve your Google ranking

3. They are excellent for promotion. Add your facebook page, twitter page, Blog, MySpace page and any other online presence you have to these site as they have millions of users and are an easy and free method to increase your online exposure

4. To improve internal business communication. As bookmarks are saved online it allows potentially hundreds of employees within a business to view them simultaneously saving time, money and encouraging interaction

You’ll see at the bottom of this blog post there is a social bookmarking tool bar allowing you to add this very blog to a variety of different sites. It’s easy to add this to your own blog and is available from GetSocial.

Told you this was a quick one. But hopefully useful. I am always up for hearing about any good social bookmarking suggestions or possible uses, so please get in touch.

Hey, Don here again. We’ve just done some pretty nifty social media strategy for one of the Further Education Colleges and I wanted to talk about our experiences and pass on some stuff we picked up along the way. Interested to know if you have any thoughts or ideas to what we came across.

Just quickly, it’s probably best to explain how and why a flat fee online recruitment business gets involved in social media strategy. Simple really, it’s all about engagement. We use all manner of the most relevant and innovative online tools to help our clients better engage with their potential and current employees.

In the case of the FE college we used our tricky little social media skills to help with their enrolment and employer engagement programmes.

This is, of course, not a definitive list, but if you are considering a social media strategy (and you most certainly should), this will give you some ideas to get you going…

1. Most Futher Education and Higher Education Colleges have banned use of social media in the colleges – don’t, you need to embrace them, they aren’t going away!

2. EVERY College is already represented somewhere on some of the social media sites – you are already “out there.”

3. There are fragmented strategies across the different departments and curriculum areas – they need to be co-ordinated and structured

4. You will already have some wonderful blogging activity with your lecturers and students – capitalise on it

5. All of the FEs have wonderful content and events that can be promoted through social media sites

6. You have a number of different stakeholders involved (different types of students, lecturers, staff, employer partners, etc) and you need effective campaigns for each.

7. These campaigns need to be “joined up”

8. There are many ways to get around the issue of “opt in” for people representation on video sites

9. Most of the FE Colleges’ organic Swearch Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not enhanced to its best capabilities, which can be rectified and managed through an effective social media campaign

10. Every single FE College’s Employer Engagement campaigns would be enormously improved by effective use of business social media tools such as LinkedIn

OK, so some quick things you need to do immediately

1. Work out where you are already represented through social media

2. Create a social media policy – work out what you need it for, who it will effect AND who will take responsibility

3. Get the most use out of Google as you possibly can (maps, images, tools etc.)

4. Engage all stakeholders, the students, the faculty members, alumni, businesses, everyone…

5. Represent yourself on the most popular mediums (and use them!)
a. Twitter
b. Facebook
c. Myspace
d. Bebo
e. LinkedIn
f. Flicr
g. YouTube

6. Link your social media sites with relevant content from your blogs and college content

7. Interchange the content on with each social media

8. Get yourself registered on the relevant social bookmarking sites

9. Create targeted advertising campaigns on Facebook for niche courses

10. Promote your social media activity across your off line marketing materials as well on email signatures, etc.

11. Measure and track activity using online social media tools such as howsociable

And a final couple of points here

1. Be comfortable with what you are doing and who you are online (some sites will “feel” better than others to use)

2. Don’t be intrusive but get involved

3. Be consistent and responsive (get involved, again)

4. Don’t forget it is for the long term, so make it part of your strategy

There was so much more to what we did and found out and I am going to expand on a few things that I think will be interesting (particularly about Facebook advertising and Twitter), but feel free to let me know what you think. Or get in touch if you want to find out more.