SEO for Job Boards:
Your Full Guide in 2024

Marty Aghajanyan | February 03, 2024 (updated) | 12 min read

Table of contents

Introduction

Anyone can start a job board, but not everyone can turn it into success. Over the years of providing a platform for hundreds of job boards, we have seen many job listing websites succeed. However, we’ve also seen many fail halfway. One of the main reasons for their failure is not having enough traffic and therefore presenting no value for both job seekers and employers.

One of the key sources of traffic for job boards is Google, if not the largest. So the better the SEO of your job board is, the more traffic you can get and the more successful your job board will be. But how do you improve your job board SEO?

The key to a good SEO for job boards is being able to target the right audience with relevant content. This article will help you learn all the important tips for job board SEO and how you can optimize and improve your website through it. So, without any delay, let’s get right to it!

1. Create SEO-Friendly Job Listing Pages

If you’re just starting your job board SEO journey, it might be helpful to understand where the other job boards get their traffic from. To do so, we’ll use Ahrefs to get estimated data about the traffic LinkedIn Jobs generates.

Here you can see that LinkedIn Jobs has around 6.2M monthly traffic from Google alone.

But the main question remains, which pages bring that amount of traffic to LinkedIn Jobs? To find the answer, let’s check the Top Pages section on Ahrefs.

Here we can see that 17% of the LinkedIn Jobs traffic comes to their main page, while the rest 83% is divided between their 1M+ optimized pages.

If we scroll down the list, we’ll see that those pages are job listing pages organized by location, category, and type of jobs. This gives them a better chance of showing up on the first page of SERP (Search Engine Result Page) whenever people make queries for specific job types.

Let’s apply what we’ve learned above to a hypothetical example.

Pretend, we have a job board for a cyber security niche, what kind of job listing pages do we need to have?

For that, we can search “cyber security jobs” in the Ahref Keyword Explorer tool to get keyword ideas.

If we scan all the results and also search for other roles in the niche, we can create the following job listing pages:

Type	Keyword	Searches Per Month
Home Page	cyber security jobs	50,000
Jobs by Categories	cyber security analyst jobs	1,900
	penetration testing jobs	1,700
	cyber security analyst jobs	3,000
Jobs by Location or Remote	remote cyber security jobs	2,600
	cyber security jobs in canada	1,300
	cyber security jobs nyc	800
Jobs by Company	google cyber security jobs	1,100
	fbi cyber security jobs	900
	amazon cyber security jobs	500
Jobs by Level	entry level cyber security jobs	8,400
Jobs by Level	senior cyber security jobs	70
Jobs by Type	part time cyber security jobs	600
Jobs by Type	cyber security contract jobs	350

With these pages, we can get way more traffic from Google, than if we had only a homepage with ‘cyber security jobs’ title.

By the way, if you use JBoard to create your job board, we will automatically generate SEO-friendly job listing pages for you based on categories, tags, job types, and locations. All you need to do is to make sure the categories and tags in your job board match what people are searching for.

2. Drive More Traffic With a Blog

Besides job listings and job detail page optimization, there’s also another golden opportunity for content marketing, which can help you target the right audience for your job board and bring in more traffic. You can write blog posts that employers and job seekers in your niche search for.

Content Relevance

But can you write about any topic related to your niche? Technically, you can do it, but based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s important to cover topics that are most relevant to not only your niche but also your job board.

Let’s take two keywords to understand this better:

cyber security trends ~2,000 searches/month
cyber security job description ~2,000 searches/month

As you can see, they both have the same amount of monthly traffic. The key question is: Is the same amount of traffic going to the ‘cyber security trends’ as valuable as the one going to the ‘cyber security job description’?

The answer is no! Because the person who is searching for ‘cyber security trends’ simply wants to educate himself about the trends, while the one searching for ‘cyber security job description’ is most probably going to write a job post. So if he comes across your job board through this kind of content, there’ll be a good chance for him to post that job posting on your website.

Blog Post Ideas for Your Job Board

Based on our research, here are some blog post ideas that can help you generate highly relevant traffic.

Idea 1: Salary Data Statistics

Blog posts that cover salary data statistics for different roles have high relevancy since the person who is searching for the salary data is most likely interested in new opportunities(is a job seeker) or looking to hire for such roles and researching the compensation data(is an employer).