Optimising your college's career site for search engines might sound like a task that’s way too technical for you to manage yourself. But in practice, SEO (search engine optimisation) is really just a matter of ticking off lots of small tasks that, combined, keep your college's website healthy and visible to search engines like Google.
One thing to bear in mind is that there’s no quick fix when it comes to SEO. There’s no silver bullet trick you can pull that will instantly make your career site appear in all the best candidate’s job searches. But the good news is that improving your website’s SEO isn’t hard, it just takes a bit of time.
Put some of these SEO tips into action and you’ll make your college's career site more visible to the right candidates when they look for jobs using search engines.
Make your content scannable
Making your content pages of your website easy to read isn’t just good for candidates - Google loves this too.
If you publish pages with huge paragraphs of text and way too many words on the page, no one is going to read them, and search engine crawlers will struggle to know what the page is about. If Google can’t easily tell what the page is about, it will appear less frequently in candidate searches.
Make your content scannable by using short paragraphs and headers to break up the text. SEO best practice is to have one h1 title and at least 3 h2 title headers throughout the rest of the page. When you’re creating job ads, the Client Portal will automatically class your job title as an h1 header. Then, break up the job advert by adding short paragraphs, separating them with h2 titles that include keywords to tell readers (and search engines) what each paragraph is about.
Localise your keywords
When you’re thinking about good keywords to include on your career site, it’s natural you’ll first think of words like ‘lecturing jobs,’ ‘jobs in colleges’ and ‘career in FE’.
But when you choose generic keywords like this, you’re actually making it a lot harder for your website to compete for space in search results. These sorts of keywords are really competitive because so many other FE websites from all over the UK (and beyond!) will be targeting them too.
By focusing on localised keywords instead, you’ll instantly reduce the level of competition. Switching these keywords to things like ‘lecturing jobs in Manchester’ or ‘career in FE Glasgow’ will be much less competitive. You’ll also increase your visibility with the most relevant teachers who are looking for jobs in your college's area.
Don’t skimp on meta data
If you don’t know what meta data is, it’s essentially a summary that tells Google what each page of your website is about. Meta data comprises of two components: your meta title and meta description.
Within your career site editor, you will have an ‘SEO & sharing’ tab where you can edit your meta title and meta description as you see fit. Your career site will come with a default title and description, but you can change this to anything you think will be better for SEO.
Meta titles should be between 50-60 characters and meta descriptions should be under 160 characters. If you’re hosting your careers site on FEjobs, you’ll see the editor has a handy character counter built into the system that tells you how long your meta data is.
Create a Google My Business page
It’s really easy to list your school as a business on Google - and it’s free marketing!
Having a Google My Business listing for your school also looks really good to candidates. If you’re not sure exactly what a Google My Business listing looks like, here’s an example:
You can guarantee that any candidate will run a Google search on your school before applying for a role with you. And would you trust a college if there was barely any information available about the organisation online?
Ensure all images have alt tags
Alt tags are short descriptions that you add to any images you upload to your career site.
Alt tags are important for SEO. They’re what screen readers use to describe what an image is to the sight impaired, and they also add context for Google to understand what your career site is about and who it serves.
For most websites, there will be a field where you can add your alt tags in the CMS. FEjobs makes this process much easier by automatically generating your image alt tags from the image name. Therefore, it’s important to consider this when naming your image files. Use descriptive words that clearly describe what’s in the image and include a keyword if it’s relevant.
SEO optimise your job ads
There are lots of small but important steps you can take to ensure your teacher job ads are optimised for search engines. Here are just a few you need to consider for every job you post:
- Use job titles that candidates actually search for - Avoid acronyms or any creative titles - just think about what teachers will type into search engines. When you post a job vacancy through Eteach, you’ll be prompted with the most commonly used titles, which you can click to autofill.
- Include a salary bracket - Avoid using words like ‘competitive’ or ‘dependent on experience’ (DOE). This just puts candidates off from applying and will prevent your jobs from being scraped by Google for Jobs.
- Ensure you have the Google for Jobs schema implemented - For your jobs to be scraped and displayed in Google’s job search feature, you need structured data - known as the Google for Jobs schema - added to the back end of your website. FEjobs automatically has the structured data implemented for any jobs you post. But if you’re using a different website host for your careers site, you might need to ask a developer to add the schema for you.
- Make sure you have keywords in your job ad URL links - Some systems will generate random url links for job ads that you need to customise to include relevant keywords that will tell search engines what the page is about e.g. www.collegename.co.uk/careers/classroom-assistant-manchester. FEjobs will auto-generate a URL for your job advert based on your job title, which is another reason a well-crafted job title is so important.
Gather links from other websites
One of the easiest ways for Google to tell if your website is a trusted source is if other websites link to you. This is why gathering ‘backlinks’ (as they’re called) is a top-priority SEO strategy for most businesses. In fact, some businesses even hire entire teams to focus on this job; it’s a process called ‘link building’.
It’s not just that links to your website will bring you more web visitors (although this is also true) but that inbound links send signals to Google that your website is a quality resource, and you will gain more visibility in candidate searches if Google sees you as this kind of source.
On the “Header” section of your career site, you can link to your college's website, and it’s good practice to link your college's website back to your career site. Whilst this is useful for candidates visiting either site, it also has great SEO benefits.
School career site SEO is all about the candidate
When it comes to SEO tips for your school career site, you can see that ranking on Google is about providing what candidates want just as much search engines. Focusing on providing information that’s clear, informative and easy to digest will naturally improve SEO and the candidate’s experience of your website too.
But the most important thing to remember with SEO is to keep a regular eye on your website’s performance; make improvements, fix any errors and continuously add new content. That way, Google will learn over time that your college career site is an active source that job-seeking educators need to know about.
About the author
Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson is a writer and digital marketer specialising in recruitment, marketing, HR technology, and business growth. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.