Understanding Candidate Experience SEO
Purpose
This article covers SEO with Candidate Experience, mobile optimization, and methods for optimizing job posts and career sites.
Audience
This article is for current and prospective Candidate Experience users.
Overview
Google's search algorithm uses over 200 factors, including Googlebot, to determine career site search rankings. Search engine friendly content assists Google in identifying your target audience.
Eightfold uses advanced SEO techniques to improve search engine rankings, including direct submission to Google for faster updates. These efforts enhance the candidate experience through increased website traffic and improved access to job listings.
SEO methods
Eightfold uses the following SEO methods for Candidate Experience:
- Near real-time indexing and sitemaps
- Mobile-optimized site design
- Structured JobPosting markup
- White Labeling
Figure: Sample customer SEO check up score
Indexing and sitemaps
Eightfold uses Google's Indexing API to ensure that pages are promptly crawled by Googlebot whenever they are updated or modified. Per Google’s recommendation, Eightfold also publishes daily sitemaps as a backup for any potential Indexing API errors.
The following guidelines apply to publishing to Google with Indexing API:
- Eightfold individually publishes job posting URLs through Google Indexing API to keep search results fresh whenever a new position is added or modified.
- All jobs are published to Google on a weekly cadence.
- “Publish to Google” does not apply to sandbox accounts.
- Eightfold recommends using the Indexing API for job posting URLs over sitemaps because the former provides faster processing. Customers are still encouraged to submit a sitemap for full site coverage.
Sitemaps
Eightfold employs XML sitemaps to enhance website crawlability and search engine optimization (SEO). XML sitemaps provide a structured way to share detailed information about the site's URLs with search engines.
The following guidelines apply to publishing XML sitemaps:
Eightfold publishes and updates XML sitemaps daily for all externally visible URLs.
XML sitemaps enable Eightfold to assign metadata like last modification date (
Read, How do I know if a particular PCS job posting is indexed by Google to learn more about verifying indexing.
Mobile optimization
The career site design, content, and performance is tailored to accommodate multiple device types and screen sizes. Eightfold’s responsive design renders content based on the viewer’s screen resolution. As a result, the Personalized Career Site is well optimized for Google’s mobile first indexing policy. Mobile-first indexing is the practice of prioritizing the mobile version of a website's content for indexing and ranking.
Read, How do I know if my PCS pages are mobile responsive, to learn more about testing for responsive designs.
Figure: Sample PCS mobile map view.
Structured JobPosting markup
To improve the candidate experience, Google suggests adding JobPosting structured data to job posting web pages. This step ensures that postings meet Google’s eligibility requirements. Eightfold annotates job pages with structured JobPosting markup and follows Google's best practices and recommendations for structured data.
Read, How do I verify the presence of structured JobPosting data, to learn more about verifying structured JobPosting data.
White Labeling
White labeling refers to using a customer’s domain (which may have a higher reputation in terms of ranking) for a career site as opposed to Eightfold’s domain. This practice supports Google’s domain reputation search ranking factor or “TrustRank”. A customer’s domain reputation can also be important for search within Google Jobs OneBox.
White labeling is managed by the customer success team.
Google analytics
The Google Search Console provides detailed analytics for the coverage and performance of individual websites. Eightfold can verify domains that have been white labeled, granting access to the Google Search Console to address problems that may arise.
Static canonical URLs
A canonical URL is the URL of the best representative page from a group of duplicate pages. Eightfold uses static canonical URLs to prevent Google from incorrectly deduplicating and ignoring the URL parameter for the position ID (which results in some job postings not being indexed).
Job page titles
For search rankings, Google assigns significant importance or value to titles and H1 tags. Eightfold’s default approach is to incorporate the job title, location, and company name into the title, while also following Google's SEO guidelines and best practices for title tags. Eightfold also provides customization options to add additional branding information to page titles.
Title and location are set by Eightfold but the customer can provide additional title information, if desired. In this example, the customer provided more information to the job title.
<title> Acme Real Estate - Senior Project Manager | China | Acme </title>
Below is an XML sitemap snippet provided as an example:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>https://eightfoldqa.eightfold.ai/careers?domain=eightfoldqa.com</loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://eightfoldqa.eightfold.ai/careers/job/446694099584-solutions-architect-bangalore-karnataka-india?domain=eightfoldqa.com</loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
<lastmod>2023-04-28T09:58:53Z</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://eightfoldqa.eightfold.ai/careers/job/446694099572-engineer-seattle-wa?domain=eightfoldqa.com</loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
<lastmod>2023-04-28T09:58:53Z</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>