Recently I was aked by a client to critique his nursing job board. Instead of a call he asked me to write it as a report. I wanted to share those details with you. I cant tell the name of the website due to confidentiality but I think you’ll find some useful nuggets here for your own site. Want a review of your own? Contact me.
DESIGN: The site has a professional, well-designed logo with an effective color scheme that should be attractive to female nurses. Search results look fresh and easy to read. Logo’s for employers in search results is an added plus that your clients will appreciate. Job description pages are fairly sparse with a little too much white space. Perhaps you could increase the font size, bold certain sections to make it easier to read.
Another idea would be to take the header section of the job description page and box it in with a color background with white text. That would make the page more interesting and pleasing to the eye.
MOBILE: Your site is not mobile friendly. This should be your top priority! Most job sites now get 20-30% of their traffic from mobile devices. You need to create a responsive design that makes your site usable on all screens. Visits indeed.com or simplyhired.com on an iphone/android device to see how they do it. Mimic their functionality. By having a mobile friendly site you will increase your user base. In fact mobile users are like to stay on your site longer than desktop users.
SOCIAL: Recommend starting accounts on facebook and twitter. Set up autopost of all job postings to these platforms using twitterfeed.com.
SEO: Being a fairly heavy text based design your site is somewhat seo friendly. But there are some things you aren’t doing yet to improve that factor.
- Home page browser title should read: “web site name | Nursing Jobs country name | Nursing job site”
- Each country you target should have its own sub domain or folder: i.e. ypurdomain/country or country.yourdomain.com – you shouldn’t mix all countries on the same site, seperate their job postings.
- All links should have ALT tags with keyword rich text.
- Job description pages browser title should reflect Job title, location, company. For example “Job title | City/State | Company Name”
CONTENT: your homepage needs to call out to employers in a much stronger way. 20% of the homepage real estate should be dedicated to employers and how they can post a job/signup. For an example of what I mean look at jobsinsocialmedia.com and see how big the job posting button is.
You have no blog yet but you should be using it everyday to highlight new clients, jobs and content about being a nurse. Content is the new marketing and is an excellent and cheap way to get traffic and build trust.
Job alerts. I noticed the job alerts button in red on the lower right of homepage. I think you could move it up underneath the search jobs button where there is extra white space.
The signup page: under Not a Member’ you need to add 4 or 5 bullets that describe the features/benefits. Tell people why they should join. Sell your site!
Other countries: I suggest adding a dropdown list of countries to choose from so job seekers in specific locations can easily find their country of choice. In addidition I would add country flags to each of those pages to visually indicate what part of the site user is on.
Other sites: if you intend on building out other niche sites link to all of them in your footer to encourage cross-over traffic.
