Spilling the beans on traffic…..
After reading “New Year, New Jobs, New Online Record” yesterday I was impressed with the numbers HitWise presented from the verticals, although I believe the real news isn’t about who is up and coming, it’s about how these sites are generating the traffic numbers.
“Paul Forster, co-founder of Stamford, Conn.-based Indeed, attributes much of the company’s growth in market share to word-of-mouth marketing and site improvements during the year.”
I’m sure word-of-mouth is great, plus the whole thought of a grass roots campaign makes you feel all warm inside. But good old fashioned word-of-mouth alone did not propel Indeed.com to where it is by any stretch of the imagination.
Okay, what about site improvements? Here’s what I’m seeing, KILLER SEO, in tandem with AWESOME SEM. Paul and his team have supercharged their traffic since day 1, through superior SEO and smart SEM campaigns, creating a veritable traffic driving machine.
Here’s a quick example –
Using Google or Yahoo type in “xerox jobs”
Notice, Indeed in the organic (SEO) results as well as in the Sponsored Links (SEM)? This is just a quick example of what a great job Team Indeed is doing to leverage the highest traffic providers on the internet, Search Engines.
Generally, you won’t see them buying the obvious term like “jobs”, because everyone, mainly the big 3 boards, is buying those terms, which in turn is driving up the price and resulting in lower ROI. Team Indeed smartly looks at other areas of which to out perform the big 3 and their vertical search competitors. Pure and simple, Genuis.
Am I giving away Indeed.com secrets? Yea very funny, seo and sem are far from secrets. Companies in the recruitment space, especially the Big 3, have been leveraging search engines for years and HitWise shows that today Indeed is doing it better than most.
Comments(5)
Great post Chad! You’re the man!
Bob
Another great post.
Is it really a good thing that the Xerox corporate job website is 3rd behind Indeed and Monster for ‘Xerox Jobs’? While it certainly can be attributed to Indeed’s SEO efforts, isn’t it also a reflection of the search engine’s inability to recognize the relevance of the source versus the three layers of distributation?
There are too many entities trying to get a piece of the advertising dollar for the same employer owned job content. Often a job seeker clicks through from Google to Vertical to Source Job Board to Application via Corporate ATS.
I understand that Indeed’s value is in providing one stop shopping to the job seeker, but does the job seeker really need the additional layer of indirection?
It is my belief that employers will soon recognize that paying upwards of $400 for a job posting on a major board is ridiculous given that distribution is essentially free and it is more efficient to pay for the direct SEM themselves as Boeing as done. The job seeker also wins because the middle man is removed and they go direct from search engine to posting.
Right on Chad! Some day the trademark issues may become more relevant but for now, it’s the wild west. Check out http://internetinc.com/trademarks-as-cpc-keywords
-eric
Here is what companies can do to stop the trademark issues with Google.
http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html