Google for jobs is changing and this affects your recruitment website. Google itself is getting better and better at behaving more like a person and less like a machine. Good content rises up the rankings. This article points out a few things to avoid in your job ads and gives a few best practice tips.
Putting your readers first is more important than trying to ‘game the search engines’ for better ranking. But these days the two things aren’t actually that far apart.
Google is a behemoth and when they introduced Google for jobs, we all scrambled to support the schema and feature our jobs on another free platform. Win-win. But as we predicted back in 2018, they’re not doing this from the goodness of their hearts. This was an early move in a bid to start owning the turf.
The schema rules have slowly tightened up and become more prescriptive. If you want a listing, you follow the rules. No real downside yet.
In the second half of 2021, Google added some more editorial rules, as well as the data field rules (so the data was correctly labelled and presented). Now they’re starting to tell us how to write. Fortunately, their guidance follows solid common sense and supports plain English.
Anyone paying attention to Google Search Console updates may have seen these extra requirements creeping in. If you value your readers you have nothing to worry about.
Quick summary:
All well and good. Now they’ve also got your old English teacher on the case with new rules around grammar, punctuation and capitalisation.
Extra requirements:
The implication is that badly presented job ads will not feature as well as those better written and presented. Being direct, Google will promote well-written job ads in its suggested results to users. While dropping badly written job ads down towards the bottom of its results.
No arguments from us. Write well, use plain English, pay attention to grammar and punctuation. If not for your reader’s sake, because Google tells you to!
Our bespoke recruitment website platform FXRecruiter has excellent content management capabilities and is purpose-built to manage recruitment websites and jobs boards. Get in touch with one of our experts to discuss how FXRecruiter and Reverse Delta can help you. Contact Reverse Delta or give us a call on 08000 199737.
