Digital news publishers have to design their sites to appeal to new readers and to keep recurrent visitors coming back, particularly if they have a paywall. After a few years of newspapers trying to cram as much content as possible onto their online front page in ”messes of wretched excess,” papers are now emphasizing judicious content selection just as they had to do in the print era.

But digital media companies also count on their home pages as an important part of their revenue development plan. Custom job boards are an important part of many newspapers’ revenue strategy, and these publishers don’t want to relegate a money-maker to an inside page. Furthermore, the importance of mobile optimization weighs on designers for home pages. Is mobile optimization worth the trouble? Will it help job board traffic? The answer is an emphatic ”Yes!”

Benefits of Mobile Optimization of Publishing Websites

Mobile devices are no longer only, or even primarily, used as communications instruments. Mobile traffic worldwide grew by an astonishing 70% in 2012. Google has plans afoot to demote websites within mobile search rankings when sites provide a subpar user experience, by doing things like the following:

• Redirecting mobile traffic to the homepage when the mobile page equivalent doesn’t exist
• Serving 404 errors to phone users if the mobile equivalent of a site page doesn’t exist
• Having sluggish mobile landing pages
• Marketing their app with app interstitials on their way to their web content
• Including links on a mobile site to a desktop experience (and the other way around too)
• Serving videos that can’t be played on smartphones

Clearly mobile optimization is good for your search engine optimization strategy. But it also makes sense on its face: you need to serve content on the devices people want to use to access it, and those are mobile devices.

Job Hunters’ Preferences for Mobile Devices

Over three-quarters of job seekers today use their mobile devices to apply for jobs and receive notifications when new jobs are listed. Passive job seekers want to avoid searching for jobs on their work computer, and they want to hunt for jobs when they find themselves with time on their hands: waiting in line, on the train heading home, or at the DMV, for example.

Job hunting times also naturally coincide with times mobile users want to consume content, the logic being, ”Looks like the doctor is running behind schedule. I might as well have a look at the news since I’ll be in this waiting room for a while.” The job board on the front page of your mobile-optimized news site often reaches people at times when they are receptive.

The Mobile Job Board and the Job Seeker

Put yourself in the mindset of a job seeker. Perhaps she’s parked at the school waiting for kids to get out and wishing she could find a job to pay for all those extra fees the school requires. Maybe he is on the train home from a particularly trying day at work, and is on the cusp of going from passive job seeker to active job seeker. Or she’s waiting to meet her mother for coffee and wants to show she’s been making the effort to find a better job.

Job seekers use mobile devices, and they want a straightforward experience. They don’t want to enter page after painstaking page of information on their phones. They want to know their application and resume are going to an actual hiring manager rather than into the mysterious resume-sucking hole so many Craigslist job hunters encounter. In other words, you have an opportunity to make your site’s job board a positive experience for job seekers, and when you do this, you maximize job board earnings and boost your site’s traffic development efforts.

Maximizing Job Board Appeal and Earnings

When your recruitment advertising solution is mobile-optimized, you’ll please both job seekers and employers. Job seekers love job match alerts, resume management, and one-click application that prevents the hassle of prolonged typing on phones. And if your mobile job site is social media enabled, job seekers can share new opportunities with spouses, friends, and family members.

Employers love integrated chat and email that lets them communicate with promising candidates in real time, wherever they are. Online management lets employers post new jobs and modify existing ones in one place, knowing these updates will reach mobile users as well as desktop users. And real-time resume database matching helps them find job seekers much more quickly and with less hassle than traditional keyword searches.

Will mobile optimization of your website help job board traffic? Absolutely. The tools are available to accomplish this right now, so what are you waiting for?

Photo Credits: posterize/freedigitalphotos.net, stockimages/freedigitalphotos.net