As a job board, we understand you rely heavily on a constant and growing flow of traffic to increase job views, applications and registrations. SEO techniques typically is a passionate topic amongst job board owners as they are looking for ways to grow site traffic with limited advertising spend and time.

Here at JOBartO, we are routinely reviewing job board sites and discussing recommendations for job board owners on opportunities to improve their SEO efforts and positions. From our perspective, it is a combination of the little changes that will ultimately grow to a significant improvement.

In today’s post, we will share 3 technological changes for your job board that will have positive affects on your organic SEO rankings as you can focus on other SEO best practices like creating unique content and advertising on social media sites.

1). Add SSL certificate to move site url from HTTP to HTTPS 

As of January 2017, Google Chrome marked all HTTP sites as non-secure. Switching to a secure site will provide enhanced data protection that is quite applicable to job boards considering the extensive amount of sensitive information users are providing. Other advantages of migrating to HTTPS include;

a). HTTPS is a ranking signal – https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

b). HTTPS sites load 89% faster. Check out this cool tool to test on your computer – https://www.httpvshttps.com/

We recently spoke to a job board owner, who mentioned multiple jobseekers contacting the job board on why they received the warning message from Google on accessing a non-secure site. Avoid these calls!

2). Provide mobile responsiveness for the job board

Google recommends responsive web design as the best design pattern for mobile users and is again a ranking signal that will help your organic search results. By reviewing our client site analytics, more than 60% of their traffic comes from mobile devices. As the industry is experiencing, this number is expected to continue to grow. Most job boards we review, they have implemented a mobile version of the website. Unfortunately, with mobile versions of your website, the mobile and desktop versions will have different URLS, whereas responsive sites use one URL and one set of pages and files, making it easier for Google to crawl and index content.

3). User friendly URL’s

Before starting into this important topic, let’s imagine your behavior when searching in Google. Imagine if you are looking for a sales job in West Palm Beach, FL. Would you type “JobID12234” or “Sales Manager in West Palm Beach, FL” into Google? Our initial guess, is that you would take the latter approach. Take a moment and review the links on your job board and see what information you are providing to the search engines. The URL’s on the job board should be user friendly and match up to the search entry by the users. As a best practice, provide as much relevant information into the URL’s, like job title and city, state. By providing user friendly URL’s, the Google crawlers will understand the type of content on the page and improving indexing.

If you are interested to speak with one of our team members on opportunities to improve your job board technology, please feel free to contact us at info@jobarto.com or (561) 509-5986.