There have been a lot of articles written about Google For Jobs, which was released by the search giant in June 2017.
The UI stands out, and because the big blue box appears at the top of the search results, it is changing user behavior as job seekers stop scrolling down the search results page and instead click into Google For Jobs.
I don’t want to tread over old tracks that can be read all over the web. So to get an initial insight into Google For Jobs, you can read here to understand how your website can be validated to be listed in the GFJ user interface, and here to understand the potential impact it can have on your organic traffic to job pages.
So, now that you are up to speed on what Google For Jobs is, here are three things you might not know about Google’s relatively young product.
You Can See How Many Jobs are Indexed, Viewed, Clicked and Applied For
The very first thing you need to do when analyzing how many jobs have had applications from GFJ is understanding how many of your jobs can be indexed by Google. To do this -
Log into your Search Console
Click ‘Search Appearance’ in the left-hand column
Click ‘Rich Cards’
Click ‘Enhanceable cards’, which will show you how many jobs are eligible to be shown with the new functionality (‘Enhanceable’ and ‘Fully Enhanceable’ will both be indexed in Google For Jobs)
The next thing you are going to want to know is how many eyes you are getting on your vacancies.
To see this, stay in Search Console and –
Click ‘Search Traffic’ in the left-hand column.
Click ‘Search Analytics’.
Click ‘Impressions’ and ensure ‘Clicks’ is unchecked.
Click ‘No filter’ below ‘Search Appearance’; this will now give you the options of ‘job details’ and ‘job listing.’
‘Job listing’ shows you how many eyes have scrolled past your job listing, which you can see on the left-hand side of the Google For Jobs UI on desktop. ‘Job details’ shows you how many people have clicked on a job listing and have read your job description.I appreciate that what I have provided you with above doesn’t give you the most essential information though, which is to see how many people have clicked on the job description and come through to your site to convert. To do this you now need to log into Google Analytics.
Once you have selected the property you want to view –
Click ‘Acquisition’ in the left-hand column.
Click ‘Campaigns’.
Click ‘All Campaigns’.
Place the following text ‘google_jobs_apply’into the search bar, which can be found below the graph and above the table.
You can now see how many people have clicked through to your site from Google For Jobs.
In the far right-hand column of the table, you can now filter by conversions, set your preferred conversion point and see how many people have applied for a job on your website.
Now you know how many of your jobs are eligible to be listed in Google For Jobs, how many people have seen them, and how many people have clicked them and converted on your website.
Can you reduce budgets for posting your job across all those different job boards?
How often do you post your job onsite and then post the same job on lots of different job boards, hoping that you catch the eye of a potential candidate?
Google has historically given preference to the most established job boards within its ranking algorithms, but Google For Jobs focuses on what role is most suited to the candidate, rather than which job board possesses the most authority.
What does that mean? Well, instead of Google showing the same job over and over again, because it has been listed on numerous job boards ( which it used to), Google now shows just the one listing (as you can see below). These options give the user the opportunity to click on any website which is set-up for Google For Jobs and apply via their website of choice.
I have no proof to back this up, but given that English is read right to left, it could be easy to assume that the link on the left-hand side will eat up the majority of the clicks.
As a business owner, why would you be paying for your job to be listed on those job boards any longer, when your job listing on your website has just as much opportunity to be seen and clicked as the bigger job boards?
This feature is likely to be the start of the end for some of the smaller job boards as businesses become less reliant on the exposure they previously provided, with the newly released marketing budget potentially being invested into an inevitable Google For Jobs ad space within the UI.
The More You Include in Your Job Post the More Likely You Are to Rank Higher
There isn’t a lot of guidance on how to rank highly in the new UI, and it doesn’t appear that many of the search engineers within Google understand the intricacies of the job search engine either.
John Mueller is a Webmaster Trends Analyst for Google, who regularly holds webinars with SEOs to patiently answer their questions on search. However, even someone of this high level of search engine knowledge within the organization isn’t entirely up to speed on how the ranking algorithms in GFJ operate.
AFAIK we don't have any information on ranking within Google For Jobs.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) September 5, 2018
Tarquin Clark who is Group Manager for Cloud Job Discovery did give a small piece of advice though, on “the completeness of content to help with ranking.”
Recommend starting at https://t.co/9EaO2o2MWe and following the documentation. There are some suggestions around completeness of content to help with ranking no information AKAIK on apply buttons.
— Tarquin Clark (@tarquinc) September 5, 2018
This completeness of content makes absolute sense, because by providing Google with as much information as possible through structured data and on-page content, it will not only help the search engine to fully understand the role/page that it is displaying but also give it the confidence to rank the job higher, ensuring it is seen by relevant job seekers.
To guarantee that you are giving Google all the information it could possibly need to fulfill this ‘completeness,’ ensure that your jobs fit in with the ‘fully enhanced cards’ that you can see in the below screenshot, which you can pull from Google Search Console (as highlighted earlier).
N.B. The client in this example is a recruiter who doesn’t want to give away the location of their roles, and so cannot have job pages that are fully enhanced. However, there is no reason not to include this information when promoting in-house roles.
Google For Jobs is the most significant advancement the recruitment industry has seen for a long time. The days of big job boards dominating the industry may be over, as the new platform enables all jobs listings, from wherever they have originated, to be placed on a level playing field. This advancement means that recruitment company websites have as much chance of being seen in Google as Indeed or Monster do.
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