Content Marketing in the Career Industry
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If you run a business in the Career or Human Resources industry, you need ways to cut through the noise
brought on by your competition. After all, there are many well-established career websites for your readers
to visit, so you need to give them a reason to go to yours instead. And that’s exactly why you need a
content strategy. Creating and publishing quality content consistently will not only help establish your
business as the trusted authority in the career industry, but will also increase organic traffic to your
site and help your target audience find you online—rather than finding your competitors first.
That’s probably why one survey found that 84% of companies
have a content marketing strategy in place. If
you don’t yet, and you’re not sure where to start, here’s a breakdown of how to create your own content
marketing strategy for your career business.
Define Your Company Your Marketing Goals
Why do you need content marketing? What do you hope to accomplish by publishing content representing your company? If you’re not sure how to answer, consider that content marketing—when done right—can do the following for your brand:
- Build brand awareness
- Position your business as the authority in your field
- Increase organic traffic to your website through search
- Raise the engagement level of current customers and readers
- Improve customer retention and loyalty
- Collect leads so you can better market products and services in the future
Think about the major goals you have in mind for expanding your company's reach. And note—your goals may change over time. Be prepared to revisit your content marketing strategy at least once a year. For example, you might start out primarily wanting more brand awareness. But eventually, you might pivot and want leads for a new product or service you’re about to launch.
Who are you writing for? Knowing your audience helps guide the type of content you publish. In the
career field, your primary audience is largely going to be people looking for a job, but you may
also have those who want to change careers or who are just looking for career advice.
It might be their first job after college, or they might be thinking about switching companies or
even industries. But either way, they’re reading your content to learn more about job hunting. As
a result, they’re likely looking for content about improving their skills, how to hone their resume,
tips on interviewing, and advice for success in the position they eventually get.
While this target audience comprises people seeking job search information, you might have readers
who don’t fit into that category. For example, if you allow employers to post jobs on your website,
a portion of your audience will be business owners, recruiters, or HR professionals. Creating content
for them is also important, such as what types of benefits they should offer, how they can better
engage current employees, or how to position their brand to appeal to top applicants.
If you offer any products or services not directly related to careers, you might have additional
target audiences outside of jobseekers and recruiters. Define those audiences before you decide
what subjects to post so you can appeal to all readers and eventually increase organic traffic to
your site, as well.
Finally, before you write anything new for your business, you need to consider your brand voice.
After all, it’s best for all of your content to sound coherent, with the same voice, tone, and
style across your site. This gives your target audience an idea of what they'll find each time
they visit.
So, ask yourself if your brand voice is any of the following:
- Warm and welcoming?
- Direct and practical?
- Empowering and uplifting?
- Formal and authoritative?
- Quirky and irreverent?
And note that there’s a difference between voice and tone. Simply put, the brand voice is your company’s personality, so it should be consistent between all pieces of content. On the other hand, your tone describes the emotional inflection within your brand voice. This means it can—and should—change depending on the type of content you’re publishing. For instance, a press release should have a different, more formal tone than a social media post that’s meant to amuse the audience.
Determine the Type of Content You Need—and Where You’ll Publish It
As you look further into content marketing,
it’s easy to get overwhelmed because of the sheer amount of types of content you can publish. But
remember - just because you want to increase organic traffic to your site doesn't mean you have to
publish every type. You can choose based on what you think your target audience would most appreciate.
And you can always change it up and start focusing on a different type of content if it turns out the
options you originally chose no longer work.
Before deciding what type of content to publish, take note of the most popular kinds
available:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts (with a link to your site)
- Infographics
- Email newsletters
- Images
- Videos
- eBooks
- White papers
- Podcasts
- Case studies
- Sponsored ads
- Brochures
As you decide the type of content to publish, think about where you’ll publish it to increase organic traffic for your business. This can help you choose the best format for your content. To make this decision, think about where your target audience goes for information. Some of the most common spots where digital marketing experts focus their publishing efforts include:
- YouTube
- Medium
- Vimeo
- Quora
- Forums
- Company blog
- Email lists
You can get an idea of where your target audience spends its time by researching the audience of each popular platform. For instance, Pew Research Center has an excellent summary of where most people spend their time online, based on their age, income, and other demographics.
You can also send out a survey via email or your website to ask your readers which platforms they visit most and what type of content they prefer. This way, you won’t waste time creating content for a platform that your audience members don’t use.
But for a career company, you can’t go wrong publishing content on your company blog and email list to start. As for social media, some of the top platforms where jobseekers and recruiters are likely to check include LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
Use Keywords That Help Your Content Rank
If you want to see increased traffic to your site, you'll need SEO strategies. SEO refers to Search Engine
Optimization. What does that mean? Basically, you need to research and use top keywords that appeal to
people who are looking for content like yours.
After all, 81% of consumers
perform an online search to find companies that offer the products, services, or content they want. Your
website should come up as one of the first sites they see when they search on Google and other search
engines. Ranking on the first page or even being part of a featured snippet—where your content appears
as a quick answer to common questions—helps drive and increase organic traffic.
To achieve this kind of success with on-page SEO methods, you need to choose the right keywords. What
words or phrases does your audience use when looking for companies in the career field? Use those keywords
in your content as much as possible without it looking unnatural or unreadable.
This requires some keyword research to find short and long tail keywords. Fortunately, there are a few
keyword research tools you can use for free
to find the best keywords for your site. For instance, you can use Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest,
or Moz Keyword Explorer.
Which SEO Keywords Should You Use for Content Marketing in the Career Field?
Once you choose your keyword research tool, you’re ready to get some great keyword suggestions. Start by
entering the most obvious keyword for your business. In the career field, this would be “career.” When
you do this, you’ll see a list of all related keywords, along with their search volume, which is the average
amount of searches per month that the keyword gets. You’ll also see the difficulty level for each keyword,
which tells you how hard it is to rank for that word—with low numbers being the easiest to rank for on
search engines.
Here’s what Ubersuggest says are the top keywords and their search volume:
- career; 165,000 searches per month
- careerbuilder; 201,000 searches per month
- career test; 90,500 searches per month
- career builder; 74,000 searches per month
- career quiz; 49,500 searches per month
- career cruising; 27,100 searches per month
- career aptitude test; 27,100 searches per month
Basically, if you want the best chance of ranking in search results, you should work these keywords into your content as much as possible. Ubersuggest even offers some free content ideas to write about using these keywords, such as blog posts about the type of career you should have and news stories about careers that famous people have. This tool also tells you which websites rank the best for each keyword. You can visit these sites and get an idea of what the content you want looks like.
You might get slightly different results depending on which keyword research tool you use, so don’t be afraid to try a few tools to end up with a decent list of short and long-tail keywords. For instance, when you enter “career” into the Google Keyword Planner, the following list comes up:
- careers
- jobs
- Amazon jobs
- jobs hiring near me
- work from home jobs
- part-time jobs near me
- Walmart careers
- government jobs
- Amazon careers
Plus, Google gives you some ideas on words to use to broaden your search, such as job board, training, education, and job listings. After browsing these results, you’ll know which keywords to include in your content to increase organic traffic. As you create content with these keywords, keep in mind that the ideal keyword density is about 1-2%, which means it’s best to include each keyword 1 to 2 times per 100 words. This way, the content reads naturally but still has a good chance of ranking for SEO.
Measure Your Results Along the Way
So you’ve defined your audience, brand voice, and reasons for content marketing. And you’ve narrowed
down the types of content to create, where to publish it, and which keywords to include. Great; you’re
ready to get started on actual content creation and marketing. But wait! How are you going to know what
works and what doesn’t? After all, some of your content is going to fall flat, and some of your keywords
just won’t be great for your page rank. But how will you know which content and keywords are working—and
which ones aren’t?
The answer is metrics, which measure your content marketing success. Just paying close attention to
content marketing metrics will set you apart from competitors, as not all companies do this. More
specifically, one report found that while 80% of businesses
surveyed use some metrics, only 65% measure performance, and just 43% measure ROI for content marketing.
So, which metrics should you measure, and how can you do this? First, set up an account with Google
Analytics and connect your website and blog to get all the information you need to track. The metrics
that will tell you the most about your marketing efforts include:
- Unique page visits
- Time on page
- Bounce rate
- Number of pages viewed on the site during each visit
- How readers found your site
- Click-through-rates on your links
- Number of inbound links to your site
- Downloads of gated content
- Number of forms filled out by visitors
- Purchase of products or services on your site
- Content shares
- Content likes
When you keep track of these metrics, you can see which pieces of content are the most popular with your audience. For instance, if a blog post gets more page views, shares, and comments than your other content—and the time on that page is longer than your other posts—you know your audience has found that content valuable. Similarly, when you get a lot of shares, likes, and comments on a social media post, you know it’s been successful—and you should publish more like it to increase organic traffic!
Learn from the Best in Content Marketing for HR
You now have all the information you need to get started on a content marketing strategy for your
business in the career field. But if you’re just looking for some inspiration—and you’re wondering
what kind of topics are most likely to increase organic traffic—it’s a good idea to look at your
competitors to see what they post.
Fortunately, one of Scripted’s writers did some research on this and shared the findings in this blog
post: Top 10 Career Websites by Traffic (And How They Did It!).
If you want to find out which sites ranked the best and why, take a look at our summary of three of
these sites in the list below for inspiration.
The top career site is Indeed, which gets 71.2 million organic clicks per month. Nearly 28% of its traffic is from search. Not surprisingly, this career website lets employers post jobs and makes it easy for jobseekers to apply to them. But beyond that, there are several resources that appeal to the target audience. They include:
- News on the job market
- A blog that offers career advice
- Samples of cover letters and resumes
- Information on certifications and schools
- Average salaries for each industry
- Company reviews
Clearly, Indeed offers a lot of content—and that creates a chance to include several high-ranking keywords to increase organic traffic! If you want a specific example of the type of post that appealed to Indeed’s audience, the site’s highest-ranking page was a blog post about how readers could get the job they want.
The next top career site is The Balance Careers.
This site gets 7.8 million organic clicks per month, and a whopping 65% of the traffic comes from
search! This indicates that this career company is doing something right when it comes to SEO.
So what’s its secret? Well, unlike Indeed, it doesn’t feature job listings or allow recruiters to
post jobs. But it does have a rather robust blog chock-full of information for jobseekers. Some
of the top blog posts on the site fall into the following categories:
- Unemployment
- Job loss
- Career tips
- Hiring best practices
- Job searching
- Employee management
- Employment law
- Workplace tips
Clearly, this site can appeal to a wide audience. In addition, The Balance Careers features thorough descriptions of different careers, which is helpful for anyone still trying to figure out their dream job or looking to switch careers.
Next up on the list of high-ranking career sites is Monster.
This site sees 3 million organic clicks per month and gets about 31% of its traffic from search.
Not only does it let employers post job listings and make it easy for people to apply, but it also
offers additional resources. For example, the salary tool lets readers see the average salary based
on job title and location.
And of course, like the other high-ranking sites, there’s a blog packed with information on careers.
You can browse posts by the following subjects:
- Interviews
- Cover letters and resumes
- Finding the right career path
- Salary and benefits
- Professional development
- Workplace
In fact, the highest-ranked blog post on Monster is about the top job interview questions—and how to answer them. Plus, you can see the following job search resources on this site:
- Resume and cover letter templates
- Thank you note templates
- Interview practice questions
- Company profiles
- Company reviews
You can check out Monster, Indeed, and The Balance Careers—along with the other sites named on our list of top 10 career websites—to see how successful content marketing in this field is done. And if you’re interested in more blog post ideas, you can check out our article about The Best Career Blogs on the Web to get even more inspiration on what to write!
Get Help from the Experts
Content marketing involves a lot of strategizing before you can even start creating effective content.
These tips can help you get organized as you come up with a strategy that works best for your company.
Now you know what kind of content to publish, which keywords to use, how to define your audience, and
more.
All there is left to do now is write your content. And that’s the one job these tips can’t help with…
but the professional writers at Scripted can! After all, writing good content takes both time and skill,
and many business owners lack at least one of those.
That’s why getting help from writing experts is recommended. You can’t fill a blog or social media
page with tons of effective content and well-researched keywords without spending a lot of time writing.
So why not save your time and leave the writing to the professionals at Scripted? To learn how, read
Hiring a Career Writer: The Step-by-Step Guide.
Then browse our highly specialized, experienced Scripted writers
to start getting fresh, SEO optimized content for your business!
