Situation
CareerBuilder.com, established in 1995, has become one of the top online employment recruitment and career-advancement resources in the nation, available through
more than 130 local newspapers, reaching a combined Sunday print circulation of more than 15 million readers with more than 26 million unique visitors to its
newspaper websites each month.
Challenges
Although the CareerBuilder.com Website had been gaining in popularity, the company found that only their home page and main category pages were achieving
prominent rankings in search engines. Therefore, their goal was to not only increase visibility on those important pages, but to also achieve visibility within
the major search properties on specific internal job listing pages.
Just a small percentage of CareerBuilder.com's pages were indexed in Google, the top search engine according to market share. Google's ranking algorithm
strongly considers link popularity within its ranking criteria and because of this, it is extremely important for a website to have external links pointing at it
from a number of high quality portals, such as other major search engines. Therefore a major goal for CareerBuilder.com was to specifically increase their
website's visibility within Google.
Another challenge for the Company was that their website lacked a regional component -- as the jobs advertised on the site were located in specific geographic
regions and yet there were no region-specific pages on the site. As a result, the company was failing to reach a significant segment of their target audience.
Solution
A first step was for iProspect to develop custom meta data for CareerBuilder to implement on most of the site's pages. We also separated different industry
verticals within the site into unique sub-domains, thus allowing CareerBuilder.com to obtain multiple directory listings. The multiple sub-domains also created a
theme that spider-based engines recognized. This allowed Google to index more pages on the site as a whole, thus solving the problem of CareerBuilder having
minimal pages indexed. At the recommendation of iProspect, CareerBuilder also implemented a directory structure of state and city pages where users could
navigate to specific locations of interest. A significant number of these pages were also indexed by Google.
Results
Total top-30 rankings for the CareerBuilder.com Website increased 362%.
Traffic increased 600% from Yahoo!, one of the largest search properties, according to market share. Traffic also increased dramatically with the two other
top search engines, MSN and Google. MSN referrals climbed 291% and Google traffic jumped 274%.
Prior to the search engine marketing campaign, CareerBuilder.com had just 80 pages indexed within Google. Since partnering with iProspect, 677,060 pages
have been indexed - a tremendous improvement over baseline.
