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Google for Jobs: How to get your job listings seen by as many candidates as possible

22nd July 2022

Long gone are the days of physical CVs, but are online recruitment companies also becoming obsolete?

For a long time, companies depended on third-party recruitment sites to advertise their vacancies, collect applications and weed out the best candidates for the role. In fact, if a business didn’t advertise its job listings across multiple different recruitment sites, it was unlikely that anyone would see or apply for the job.

However, in the summer of 2017 Google launched its own answer to job listings; Google for Jobs. This has slowly but surely changed the online recruitment game, making it easier for both companies and candidates to advertise and find roles respectively.

So, when a member of the Fife Chamber approached David wondering how they could use SEO to effectively advertise for a new position, David was more than happy to explain the ins and outs of Google for Jobs.

How Google for Jobs changed the recruitment landscape

As job searches on Google increased year on year, the clever brains at Google saw a space in the online market for job listings and decided to take advantage.

Somewhat surprisingly, Janice Chaka of Buisness.com has cited that around 30% of ALL Google searches are job-related. This translates to around 300 million searches per month, all of whom would have started their job search on Google but then would have moved back and forth between different recruitment sites as their search goes on.

Google realised that they could create a new on-page feature that allowed users to find jobs faster and easier, but which also kept users on Google as opposed to entering other websites.

The main goal of Google for Jobs was to create a “candidate first” experience, giving power back to the candidate rather than the recruiter. This creates a better user experience for Google’s customers, which ultimately leads to more traffic, searches and revenue for the internet giants.

Google for Jobs aims to give job seekers exactly what they expect when looking for vacancies: detailed, in-depth information about job roles, a high level of consistency among vacancies and the ability to find a large variety of job offers, all in the same place.

Google for Jobs also helps businesses find candidates easier WITHOUT having to turn to third-party recruiters. Simply by using best-practice organic SEO methods, businesses of all types and sizes can now easily reach a wide net of potential candidates in the highly competitive online job market.

Structured data and Google for Jobs

One of the most important aspects of getting your job listing from your own company website to ranking on Google’s search results page is by using structured data.

Structured data helps the Google algorithms understand the exact nature of the job ad by embedding the details of the job post in the HTML code.

This way, Google can quickly understand what the job is about, who it is for and where it is located. Google can then start listing the job ad on relevant search terms, which in turn, gets it seen by the most relevant candidates.

To understand how to apply structured data to your job listings, we recommend checking out Google’s own page on structured data for job postings.

Structured Data is information inside the code of a page that Google can easily pick up and accurately display in an organised way (Image source: Seobility)

How to use SEO to get your job listings seen by more candidates

As established, the main aim of Google for Jobs was to give power back to the candidate.
For this reason, the best way to get your job ad ranking as high as possible on Google search results is to offer complete transparency in the job listing.

Ranking factors for Google for Jobs are based on how complete and detailed the job posting is, so it is therefore important to provide in-depth details on all of the following:

Role description: Don’t hold back on ALL the duties, responsibilities and details of the job role
Skills required: Try to populate the skills with related keywords. For example, if the job role was for a marketing manager, it would be wise to mention phrases such as PR, online marketing, communication, etc.
An accurate salary bracket: People like to know how much money a job is offering and there is nothing more frustrating than seeing a job role WITHOUT the salary listed. Google have recognised this and made it a key factor in ranking job adverts.
Exact job location: Even if the job is remote or across different locations, try to list one main location as this will help ranking in your local area.
Add the date when the job was first published, and delete the listing once it becomes filled.

The Googe for Jobs board displays well-structured results for "marketing Manager Jobs", pulling through location data as well

When it comes to the writing of the job post, the following tips will also increase your chances of ranking higher on Google's job listings:

Be descriptive but make the content easy to read
Add bullet points as it helps make the content more scannable for users
Include the location within the copy
Use a clear structure with headings outlining the different sections i.e., role description, required skills, salary, desirable skills etc
Make the job positing between 400-800 words, anything less will struggle to rank
When it comes to the main title of the job ad, use the job role as your h1; “Marketing Manager”.

You can read more about Google for Jobs and the effect it has had on the online recruitment space in this helpful blog post from Inspire.