How to Improve Your 'Drive by' Ecommerce Postings (member only)

I received a message from new member who asks;

Do you have anything on basic SEO tactics we can implement? This would be for the job seeker and employer side of the job boards we power for our newspaper partners. We have about dozens of sites and the goal is to grow e-commerce self service revenue.

Its a great question and requires multiple answers. When he talks about “self service” revenue he means getting job postings with no sales effort. The employer simply discovers the site, post their jobs and pays online. No human needed. The more of these “drive by” orders you can get the less you have to actually sell/prospect for. But if you have a new site these are the hardest to get. Reason being is that your site has no history with customers. It is new and untrusted.

Older more established sites have the highest rate of self service postings by far. When I sold AllCountyJobs after 13 years I was getting 80% postings by simple just being online. I had built up thousands of past employers who knew my sites and what they could do. They simply went to the site and paid.

Recently I chatted with the owner of PsychologyJobs.com which makes thousands per month through zero sales effort. He does that by A) having the best domain possible which ranks #1 on Google….and B) the site is powered by the Your Membership platform which comes with built in healthcare job networks he belongs to and the YM sales team helps drive orders to him.

Though a new site will take time to establish itself there are some things you can do to increase the chances of drive by orders. Lets take a look at some of those tactics.

First you need to have a great domain name and a great looking site. Also your e-commerce checkout process should be damn easy. Platforms like Jobboard.io have a great checkout process by going straight to the job posting form. There’s no login or registration required in order to post. This method removes that barrier for new customers.

SEO TACTICS
SEO can help to pick up drive by customers but it is also the most time consuming to maintain. New sites takes a couple years to really rank well in Google for employer/job search terms. And content is a bitch to create but it has to be done if you want traffic.

Get on Google for Jobs. If you aren’t indexed yet by the big G, better get started. It is the newest way to get free traffic and is going to become the primary way Google will send you traffic. Right now sites with less than 1,000 jobs only get a trickle of traffic but that should gradually improve over time. Be sure to fully optimize your jobs by having the right meta data and paying attention to your Google Search Console trends.
On page SEO. If you use a third party job board software today most of them already have your on page tactics covered. I am talking about keyword based URLs with job title/city/company/state, H1 tags on the page for the job title, browser titles with the job title/company/location and plenty of text to describe the job.
Backlinks. Getting backlinks is still a viable method for ranking…IF you can get them. Maximize your use of free business directories and social profiles. Create target lists of sites and blogs that might link to you and offer to create a link exchange. Here’s one place to start.
Footer text. Use your footer to target your primary phrase you want to be ranked for. It will appear on every page of your site. When I set up a site recently for AgencyChecklists which covers the insurance industry in Massachusetts I added this phrase to the footer: “A curated, local job board for the Massachusetts Insurance Industry.“
Buying other domains. This is perhaps my favorite SEO tactic. I look for and buy job related domains that are up for sale or used to have a job board on them. You can find them on sites like SEDO, GoDaddy Auctions and Flippa.com. Buy ones that are aged and which already have backlinks then do a 301 Redirect on the URL to your existing site. You can boost your rankings in an instant.
Content marketing. If you run a job board today you should be cranking out content for both seekers and employers. The more quality content you can produce the quicker you can rank. The content should also talk about your niche or local market frequently so that you are sending signals to Google that this is your niche. Be sure to link back to various pages of your site within that content.
Updating Content. If you have old content on your site that still gets SEO traffic consider updating it to make it fresher and add more content to it. Google appreciates content that is kept updated.

SOCIAL TACTICS

Every job board should be on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter at a Minimum. Use the same branding and logos on each channel so you have a consistent look across each one. Add your website link to your profile in each channel.
Push your content. All your job content should be pushed to each channel. If you have a lot of jobs consider creating ‘job only’ accounts and hashtag them according to your niche. You want this content to appear in searches on Facebook/Tw/Li. About 20% of your overall traffic should come from social if you are doing it right. Getting your jobs in social is like “Social SEO” and I have had good success with this strategy.
Commenting and liking. By taking part in conversations, commenting, liking, retweeting, etc, you will get attention and clicks. I frequently search LinkedIn for terms like “We’re Hiring” and then leave a comment about my site, sometimes with a free offer or discount code. It works well.

Finally you must remind your past customers that you still exist which means staying in touch with them on a consistent basis. Send a newsletter at least once per month to seekers and employer. Get them to come back and post. Embed “Post a Job” or “Post a Resume” links inside those emails as calls to action.