Is the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) a compulsory skill for The Online Recruitment Marketing Manager?

The ‘usual’ Marketing Manger in the recruitment industry in Ireland up until a few years had his job divided into the traditional offline marketing efforts (even a guerrilla marketing falls into this here!) and the online marketing. Online marketing consisted of purchasing the subscriptions on the job boards, getting the recruitment web site done up, and perhaps purchasing a banner or similar advertisement from the news portals. And it was all well back then, and most of the actual work could easily be outsourced to an external vendor – a marketing agency. And then came Google…

Google messed up the life of a marketing manager, simply because someone up in the management got an idea to ask a question:

Why do job hunters not apply to our web site and instead go to the job boards, and we have to pay for advertising there? Surely we can do a good site as well?!

The classic advertising or marketing agency failed to deliver a single visitor from eh Google search engine, so Google invented Google AdWords. Being the number crunchers and statistical people by nature, the Google failed to understand who will be the end users of their AdWords tools, so the interface was all in numbers, percentages, and zillions of statistical acronyms. You really needed a PhD in statistics to understand anything there. So a new breed of consultants surfaced, the Google AdWords Management Consultants. Most Irish recruitment marketing managers even today fail to understand they do need to hire them to manage their AdWords campaigns. It simply undermines their management authority to outsource management of their precious budgets. Jet they didn’t really care for the statistics in school., but are ‘creative’ people by nature.

When enough Irish online recruiters, and those who wanted to become ones, started using Google AdWords to drive the precious job seekers to their recruitment web sites, the price of the visitor started climbing up. And up… So the Google AdWords became too expensive for the generalist recruitment, and the new breed of marketers surfaced up in Ireland the SEO Consultants.

My Definition:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a ‘science’ (is it?) that defines the elements that affect search engine ranking of a web site for a particular keyword in a set search engine.

So how can a SEO Consultant help a Online Recruitment Marketing Manger in Ireland? Well a SEO guy can help ‘optimise’ the recruiters web site so that it gains higher ranking for the recruitment related keywords (or phrases) or for some other (industry or location) related search keywords. A search keyword or search phrase is the text that people using the search engine type to perform the search. So in short, a SEO consultants job is to change the web site so that the web site gets more traffic. In the recruitment industry – it means more free visitors – more applications – more CVs – more placements!

This is where it gets very confusing to our Irish Online Marketing Manager. The SEO Consultant simple does not speak the same language. Also there is absolutely nothing exact in the SEO!? There is no formula (Google keeps it as a Coca Cola recipe!), nothing really to back up what the SEO Consultant is ‘preaching’.

The effect of this falling behind in the ever changing knowledge of running the online business is very beneficial for the Irish Jobs Boards. Since absolutely no Irish recruitment agency have ever made a substantial effort to make a web site that would have a high visitor numbers, they simply have to purchase traffic from Google AdWords or completely rely on their advertisement on the job boards. There is a limited success they achieve with newsletters where they offer a iPod Nano raffle for a CV submitted, or a bit of Radio and print advertisements. But all those traditional marketing efforts combined bring only a small fraction of het CVs that a well optimised recruitment web site bring in Ireland today.

Therefore a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a compulsory skill for The Online Recruitment Marketing Manager in Ireland today.