Jobs: a competitive industry Will Critchlow Pro SEO Boston 2011

The scenario: we picked a couple of tough industries and put together plans for how we would help a business compete. I am doing jobs

I’m not proposing an agency solution: I am presenting a scenario of what I would do walking into this situation without my team behind me

So, imagine: I’m going in-house, for 3 months, to effect changes that will outlast me

The same is true of our estimates of what we can get done in days, weeks, months http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/ “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” - Bill Gates

My first task is to convince the whole company to build the right things in the right way. I’ve started giving this pitch to some of our larger UK clients Why you should love SEO http://dis.tl/iyV9rh

There is loads of innovation happening in the recruitment space recently – http://jobwhizz.com

There is loads of innovation happening in the recruitment space recently – http://activeinterview.com

There is loads of innovation happening in the recruitment space recently - http://www.zoho.com/recruit/lp/applicant-tracking.html

There is loads of innovation happening in the recruitment space recently - http://recruiting.jobvite.com/

We’ve even been trying our hand - https://www.hiremarshal.com/

Everyone can help Yep, even the CEO

Stand for something: e.g. “employing our way out of an economic downturn”

You’d have to mean it: online training like http://www.peepcode.com and post-placement support like http://dis.tl/jmaGJu Fund training Support successful candidates

Not only do you stand for something: people who believe in your message are aligned with promoting it

But seriously, more tips please Go and do this: give this presentation to your boss, your clients, your clients’ developers, your developers http://dis.tl/iyV9rh

Learn from things others struggle with

Jobs typically expire: leading to nasty IA challenges

Encourage perma-jobs: give companies a way to create “always hiring” adverts to help work around the expiring content issue. Re-use URLs

Jobs are listed on many sites: your UGC ends up not unique

Offer discounts for exclusivity: at least exclusivity of copy if not the whole job (seems common in the real estate market)

It’s really hard to deserve to rank: category pages (“XXXX jobs in YYYY”) are the natural candidates, but they easily become lists of links

I tweeted a question: “what (apart from the obvious) would you want to see on a ‘journalism jobs in Boston’ page?”

Rich visualizations: see Tableau Public - http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2010/01/60years

Job-seekers don’t (generally) tell the world what they’re doing and so are unlikely to form the basis of a community From a discussion on metafilter about changes to digg

More likely: Job seekers are the product – job advertisers are your community. Use persona modelling for your link building

We announced that we were hiring in NYC Which referrals actually lead to hires? A lot of money is spent advertising jobs. Job analytics and affiliate programs would WIN

And learn from others’ successes too

@dsottimano in the London office built a prototype tool for finding SERPs competitors http://dis.tl/matgaQ

Analyse a competitor’s link success: by section of their site / tactic http://seogadget.co.uk/what-are-my-most-linked-to-subfolders/

…and their search visibility success segmented by the same things

This helps you find tactics to investigate and build boss- / client-friendly arguments

Find the gaps: using this technique, we found that white label jobs boards are successful, but no-one’s providing them to .edu or UK magazine sites

13 things you can actually go and do

Use developers for link building: one of my favorite tactics. Developers can create amazing stuff incredibly quickly when working from scratch

Use developers for link building: they can even build useful stuff. For example this calculator for take-home salary after tax: http://dis.tl/jS8vMC

Continuous deployment: so simple, a VC can do it [@fredwilson]. Imagine what this does for SEO Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allspaw/5436215259/

PR: all very well, but what would you actually do? See e.g. http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/ Cultivate relationships Do research (never “surveys”) Break news Hold offline events Connect to a hook

Does your CEO know your goals? Sometimes CEOs can get links from the golf course This is what Rand does most days

Hire a data scientist: essentially anyone who finds this funny. Check out presentations by @hmason at bit.ly e.g. http://dis.tl/iq1SCl http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/06/02/im-in-ur-quantum-box/

Instil design values: everyone should cultivate an eye for design and designers should stay up to date with the latest trends

Create a company-wide swipe file of cool / interesting stuff

Incentivize API development: do this in the jobs space, fund start-ups, incubate cool ideas e.g. http://www.codeeval.com

PageRank? That’s a good idea! What if you rank your jobs by the same signals you want your site to acquire: links, social signals, referral traffic?

Implementation details: can’t use raw mR of your pages because it won’t be updated soon enough. Use other signals that correlate

What if? Everyone who signed up to list a job got access to guides on how to market their jobs online?

Provide resources: evergreen content is more powerful than you think – social media is helping it spread further than ever

Hire a community manager: reach out and say thank you. T-shirts rock: http://dis.tl/mGiOXz, http://dis.tl/laIDOj, http://dis.tl/mzc2TP “Also, we've got some Geckoboard t-shirts and I'd love to send one your way if you'd be interested. Just let me know your address and what colour and size you would like; we have S, M, L and XL in Black, Orange, Green, Blue and Red.”

Get on the social train: http://www.punchtab.com/tour

Videos are now available of our #linklove conference in London and New Orleans: www.distilled.net/store

Rand tweeted a slide about my fashion sense, so I thought I’d just add this slide: “My dad beat Rand Fishkin”