“…Since the start of our relationship with iProspect, their account team has clearly displayed
dedication to and respect for our business and our goals. They have shown this through their
responsiveness, flexibility, hard work and the superb results they have achieved thus far. Together, we
were able to take a website that had very little visibility and traffic and turn it into a more
profitable and successful online business...”
- Ethan Giffin, Product Manager
Situation
Allegis Group is the world’s largest privately held staffing company. Thingamajob.com, launched in January of 2000, is the foundation of Allegis Group’s Internet recruiting strategy. The free online employment resource contains 10,000-12,000 job listings and allows job seekers to post resumes, apply for jobs and set up job alerts.
The goal for the Thingamajob.com search engine marketing campaign was to achieve more visibility within the major search properties in order to increase traffic and boost conversions (job applications, resume postings, job alert creation).
Challenges
At the outset of the search engine marketing campaign with iProspect, the Thingamajob.com Website had little content, no unique meta data, and no method for browsing job listings by category or by region. The only way for a user to find job openings was by conducting a search within the site (typing a keyword into a search box). Furthermore, search engine spiders could only index the roughly 10 pages that contained corporate copy about Allegis Group. So the client was missing myriad opportunities to have their keyword-rich job listing pages indexed.
One month into their engagement with iProspect, the client launched version 1.5 of their website. This version incorporated enhanced search engine and user content. However, though the revised site was more user friendly, it still had little content, no meta data, no effective method for searching job listings and 8,000-10,000 unindexable pages of job descriptions.
In preparation to gain better visibility and drive more traffic to the Thingamajob.com Website, the client’s internal search team discussed the critical importance of implementing an aggressive search engine marketing campaign to key colleagues. This eliminated any potential internal obstacles to implementing changes to the website.
Solution
At the start of the campaign, iProspect explained the best practices for Web design in regard to search engine optimization and then worked closely with the client to launch an updated version of the Thingajamob.com Website.
First, the iProspect team developed, and then worked with the client to implement, keyword-rich meta data on all static pages of the website. The team also crafted dynamic meta data templates for the job listings. This way, as each dynamic page was automatically generated, corresponding meta data was also generated so that the search engine spiders could easily index the content.
iProspect also suggested implementing taxonomy so that users as well as spiders were able to search down to the job listing level via higher level categories. And finally, an aggressive directory strategy was initiated, requesting links to all sub-domains from the major search directories.
When the Thingamajob.com Website version 2.0 was launched with all the recommendations in place, spiders began to crawl the site shortly afterward. The number of pages indexed in the engines consistently increased.
Results
The number of monthly search referrals to the Thingamajob Website has grown more than 2,200% since the start of the SEM campaign with iProspect.
The Thingamajob.com Website now receives almost 100,000 more search referrals each month than at baseline.
Search referrals from Google and Yahoo!, the top two search properties according to market share, have increased by more than 86,000 referrals per month.
Overall search engine visibility for the Thingamajob.com Website has increased by 330% since baseline. The number of top-ten rankings alone has increased by 281%.
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