This guide has been created with the goal of connecting recruiting businesses with job seekers via primarily online channels, specifically Google for Jobs.
The purpose of this guide is make recommendations on how you can leverage the new Google for Jobs search engine to increase visibility for your job listings and increase enquiries and job applications via organic search.
The guide will include step by step recommendations on how to add structured to the relevant job listing pages on your website to allow them to be visible for job search queries.
What pages are relevant to Google for Jobs?
The only pages that should be appearing within the Google for Jobs search engine are the jobs listings pages themselves.
This means pages on your website which list multiple jobs (by job category/by industry) for example, should be optimised for the standard Google search results, and can not be visible in Google for Jobs.
Steps to implementation
1. Crawl & Indexability
It is important to ensure all job listing pages are crawlable and indexable. This means checking the robots.txt file on the website, and ensuring folders containing job listing pages are not being restricted from being crawled and indexed in anyway.
2. Create a separate sitemap for job listing pages
For the purposes of monitoring performance is is good to ensure there is a separate sitemap for job listings pages. This will easily allow you to monitor indexation of these pages.
It would also be recommended that <priority> tags are added to all sitemaps. Priority values have range interval [0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0]. This means that the priority of your most important page should be 1.0, which is usually the homepage. This may mean relative to that, that jobs category pages are set at priority 0.8 and job listings themselves are set at 0.7 with content such as blogs and news set a 0.5.
3. Add structured data to job listing template
The key to having your job listings pages to appear in the Google for Jobs engine is to correctly mark up the relevant pages with job posting structured data. Google does support a number of structured data formats but JSON-LD is recommended on Google’s own structured data guide here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data
What strucutred data should look like for a job posting
Here is an example of how strucutred data should look for a job posting in order for it to appear within Google for Jobs:
<script id=”jobPostingSchema” type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org“,
“@type”: “JobPosting”,
“title”: “Planning Manager”,
“url”: “https://yourwebsite.com/jobs/planning-manager/”,
“datePosted”: “2019-09-12T18:26:12+00:00”,
“validThrough”: “2019-10-10T18:26:12+00:00”,
“description”: “<p>Description on the role goes here.</p>”,
“industry”: “Marketing”,
“employmentType”: “FULL_TIME”,
“baseSalary”: {
“@type”: “MonetaryAmount”,
“currency”: “GBP”,
“value”: {
“@type”: “QuantitativeValue”,
“minValue”: 50000,
“maxValue”: 55000,
“unitText”: “YEAR”
}
},
“hiringOrganization”: {
“@type”: “Organization”,
“name”: “Your Ageny”,
“url”: “https://yourwebsite.com/jobs/marketing/planning-manager/”,
“logo”: “,
},
“jobLocation”: {
“@type”: “London”,
“address”: {
“@type”: “”,
“addressLocality”: “Greater London”,
“addressRegion”: “London”,
“postalCode”: “”,
“addressCountry”: “GB”
},
Once structured data has been implemented, it is possible to test it to ensure all of the required properties are included using the Google structured data testing tool here: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
Key considerations
1. The removal of expired jobs
It is important that once jobs have expired, that they are made no longer eligible for the Google for Jobs search engine. The ways to indicate to Google that the job has now expired are:
-
Ensure the validThrough property has been populated and the date is in the past.
-
Remove the page completely therefore serving a 404 error.
-
Remove structured data from the page.
It is also important that expired jobs are removed from the jobs sitemap.
Making sure expired are removed or blocked from the Google for Jobs engine is a key consideration due to Google warning there is the possibility of manual actions on websites for failing to do so.