Have you heard? Right now is possibly the best time in history to be running a niche job board. Sure, the big three players in the job board market—Monster.com, CareerBuilder, and Indeed—are facing increasing threats from LinkedIn, but smaller digital publishers are finding that the niches they’ve carved out are still large enough to build profitable businesses that are sustainable for the long-term.
Despite those successes, there’s still a website feature that many online job boards are missing, and it could be causing publishers to lose out on monetization opportunities.
The feature that many niche job boards are missing is location tagging.
Adding a geo-location feature to your job board will improve search engine visibility and make your website more useful to job seekers. Location is one of the most important elements that job seekers look at when evaluating online listings, well ahead of compensation and benefits packages.
How to integrate location tagging into an online job board
If you’ve already created a self-serve portal where recruiters and companies can upload their own job postings, then adding a location tagging feature should be simple. Create a space in your submission form to add an address for each listing. Even if you make that space optional, you will be surprised by how many companies choose to include a specific address with their listings.
If your job board software allows for it, you can add a map to your website as a way to help candidates search for positions in specific locations. The Google Maps Platform is a great place to start, since it offers publishers a way to build customized experiences with dynamic maps and Street View images. Not only do these types of interactive maps add a visual element to an online job board, they also add valuable functionality for job seekers who are interested in working exclusively in certain cities or areas of town.
Location tags can be useful, as well. Your job board software should extract the city from each address to create location tags, which visitors can browse. Local publishers in large metro areas may want to go even one step further by including neighborhood tags.
Adding a location feature doesn’t mean recruiters are limited to posting about jobs in specific cities. Ideally, recruiters and companies posting jobs on your website should have the choice to get as specific with the location as they feel comfortable with. In a large metro area, a company might post the exact address of the office building, while a company in a more rural area might post just the city or the county.
Recruiters should also have the option to include regional tags, like ”Northeast” or “Southwest,” or even more generic tags, like “United States” or “Remote” when they can’t publicly share the specific location of an opportunity. Listings with the “Remote” tag won’t show up on any maps, but they should be searchable, for job seekers who are exclusively interested in working from home.
Whether you decide to allow multiple job locations to be tagged on a single posting is up to you, based on how the back-end of your job board website is setup. However, as a general rule of thumb, recruiters should not have the ability to select more than five to 10 locations for a single job listing.
As a side benefit, having specific location information can also help ensure your listings get included on Google Jobs, the AI-powered job board from Google that launched last year. Many niche job board publishers have seen an increase in traffic since the launch of Google Jobs. Although the majority of listings are from larger players, like Monster.com and LinkedIn, niche publishers are represented on the platform. Having the proper job schema will increase the chances of getting the listings from your job board included on Google Jobs, and that means including specific location details whenever possible.
Adding geo-location tagging to your job board is one way for your website to evolve and meet the changing needs of job seekers. It’s also an effective strategy for upping profits and boosting search engine visibility.
If you’d like more information on the strategies that job board publishers are using to monetize their websites, reach out to our team here at Web Publisher PRO.
