March Google Core Update: What Does it Mean for Recruiters?

Another March, another Google update to bring pain and suffering to those who rely on Google search to bring traffic to their page or site. Or, if you want to put a positive spin on things, another release from Google that promises to kick spam off the SERP and give prime position to the sites that follow the rules and create useful online content.

But what happens to recruiters that use SEO to bring organic traffic to their careers page or microsite? Are there any immediate actions that will help to ensure minimal impact from Google’s sweeping changes to indexing and ranking? Let’s dive into the detail and cover a few other SEO best-practices for recruiters.

What is the March update about?

The Google Core Product Update is all about reducing ‘spam’ that users may see when they enter a search term, and instead aims to deliver only the best content. First of all, let’s look at the three key areas that Google is targeting with the latest update:

Site reputation abuse

This one aims to penalise low-quality, third party content from appearing on an otherwise high quality website for the sole purpose of ranking the third party site higher. Google’s example is between an educational website and a payday loans company, but this could be applied to a poor quality content piece filled with irrelevant backlinks appearing on a site with lots of organic traffic. This could be important if you share your job posts, adverts or anything else to a partner website, or vice versa; just make sure what you host or send is relevant, related, and serves the user rather than aiming to rank higher.

Expired domain abuse

This is where webmasters leverage the traffic and authority of an old domain that still ranks and draws traffic without remaining relevant to the original site or maintaining quality content. You could, for example, buy an aged domain that has nothing to do with your business or goals, then drive traffic to a different site with redirects or a masked link. Again, recruiters are less likely to fall foul of this, but it’s one to watch

Scaled content abuse

Ok now here’s an update that could potentially affect those of us using automation every day in our recruitment. Scaled content abuse is using AI to generate lots of pages with low-quality content, generated either by AI e.g. ChatGPT, or by a human. For example, if you’ve got 500 live roles, and you use AI to create 500 new pages, and ChatGPT to write 500 job ads, Google doesn’t like it.

How will I know if Google thinks I don’t align with the update’s goals?

You’ll get a notification in Google search console saying your content is classified as spam, or you could see a drop in traffic or even certain pages being deindexed. The update is expected to carry on for several months, so keep an eye on site traffic and search console for those all-important notifications.

What is best practice?

Simply put, creating high quality content that puts the user rather than the search engine first is the key to success on Google. Creating unique, original job adverts, not copying or spinning content from competitors or elsewhere, and ensuring a user-friendly journey throughout your website or careers page are all easy fixes.

Ensuring more organic traffic is about consistency too, so make sure your company blog is up to date, your job ads or job descriptions are free from spelling errors, and that your social media channels are connected to the candidate’s experience on your site.

Putting unbroken blocks text onto the website or creating unstructured pages to host updates, job information should be avoided, and make sure you’re using headings, images, internal and external links and even video where possible to ensure the best possible experience.

Can I still use ChatGPT?

Absolutely, but Google has clearly stated (for the first time) that it will now penalise low-quality, irrelevant copy that looks like it has been created ‘at scale’ for the sole purpose of ranking.

As with any content creation, it’s always advisable to view AI writing as a tool, rather than a replacement. Use ChatGPT to analyse your job description and create a structure for your job ad, but then write the advert yourself. You’ll do a much better job of telling your organisation’s story and ensuring your unique tone of voice shines through. Sadly, ChatGPT still has hard limits, and one of those is sounding completely human at all times.

Other Google SEO tips for recruiters

We’ll leave you with a final tip you may not be actioning just yet when it comes to driving traffic to job adverts, and that is all to do with keyword frontloading. Keyword frontloading is where you take the search term your audience is looking for, and make sure it’s at the very start of your job advert. If you’re hiring Care Coordinators in Staffordshire, then here’s how your job advert’s titled and first line could look:

Care Coordinator: Care Jobs in Staffordshire

Are you a qualified Care Professional? We’re looking for Care Coordinators in Staffordshire to join our team…

You’ll notice we’ve taken the job title and made it the first thing that both Google and our user sees on the search engine results page. We’ve also frontloaded it (put it before) a search term we want to target (care jobs in Staffordshire), so now we have two search terms in one short sentence, without breaking any rules on keyword stuffing.

We’ve also included what are know as secondary keywords in the very first sentence, letting Google know we’re advertising jobs for care coordinators in Staffordshire. As long as there is a great job description after our initial keyword frontload, and we don’t mention care coordinator too many times again, that advert stands a better chance of ranking on page one.

If you found this tip useful and would like to know more about boosting organic traffic to your careers website, then reach out to the Artfully team to hear more about SEO and job advertising.