This post originally appeared on the Social Talent Blog.
When writing and posting job ads, one of your top priorities should be to increase the “find-ability” of that job ad amongst the other million and one job ads already out there. Because in order for your job ad to be successful, it needs to be easily found by the right people.
One of the simplest ways to ensure your job ad is more easily found by the right candidate, is to ensure it contains the most relevant keywords. A great resource for figuring out which keywords most candidates are searching for online, is Google Trends.
Google Trends is one of the best FREE resources to use when it comes to figuring out what words to use in your job title and descriptions when advertising jobs online, as it helps you to understand what job seekers type into the Google search engine on a daily basis when hunting for jobs. So, today we’re going to show you how to use it to start drastically improving the the SEO of your job ads:
Step 1:
Visit google.com/trends and type the keywords you think someone would type into Google to search for a job like the one you’re offering, into the search box at the top of the page. In this example, I for searched for the phrase “human resources jobs”.
Google Trends will then show you a graph displaying the amount of times that exact phrase has been searched for in Google over a specific period of time. In this example, Google is able to show me how many times “human resources jobs” was searched for worldwide in the past 12 months and in which countries the query was most popular:
We can see searches for “human resources jobs” peaked in both August 2014 and January 2015, with the least amount of searches for the term taking place in November and December 2014. We can also see that the term was most searched for by job seekers in Canada.
Step 2:
Click ‘Add term’. The real power of Google Trends is in its ability to compare the original phrase you entered to a similar but different phrase, to compare the popularity of the two. In this example, I added the term “hr jobs” to compare it against the original term, “human resources jobs”. When we run this new comparison search, we now see a graph displaying the trend for searches for the phrase “hr jobs”, compared to “human resources jobs”:
In this example, it’s very obvious that the phrase “hr jobs” is searched for by significantly more people than the original “human resources jobs” phrase. And that the term is just as popular now as during one of its biggest peaks in January 2015.
Therefore, if I was to advertise a Human Resources managerial role now, I should be use the job title HR Manager instead of Human Resources Manager to describe the job on offer, as more people search for “hr” then they do “human resources”. I would also be sure include “HR” in several areas of my job ad.
Step 3.
Try adding a third search term to compare it against the two you already have. In this example, we compared the phrase “jobs in hr” against our two original phrases, “human resources jobs” and “hr jobs”:
When trying this out for your own jobs, type in all the different ways you can think of phrasing the same job function to get a good feel for what candidates are typing into Google. Doing so will help you better title your job ads and ensure you’re using most relevant keywords in the body of your job ads – all of which will improve your job ad SEO and its “find-ability” online.
If you’re struggling to find keywords or phrases to compare, just scroll down the Google Trends results page, where you can see related terms to the terms you have searched for and what terms are rising in popularity:
This is the beauty of Google Trends. It helps you discover keywords and phrases that you wouldn’t think people would use to find your job. It can also help refine job titles down to the finest details e.g. whether or not you use “job” instead of “jobs” or abbreviate “human resources” to “hr”.
For example, by comparing the search terms “social media manager”, “social media marketing manager”, and “digital marketing manager”, Google Trends was able to tell me that a new breakout search terms for the same type of role are “community manager”, “social community manager” or just “social manager”. Other similar titles suggested were “digital content manager”, “online marketing manager” and “online community manager”:
Then comparing each of the most popular job titles, I was able to deduce that the most popular searches was for a “Social Manager” with “Social Media Manager” coming in second:
Therefore, in order to increase the SEO of the job I was advertising, I would be better off to use terms like “social media” to describe the role, rather than “digital content” or “online community”.
Remember, there is a limit to how many terms you can compare, so if you hit that limit (5 terms), just remove the weaker phrases you’ve compared to add more.