You operate a digital newspaper, magazine, or trade publication website. You have invested in a good design, and you regularly study your site’s analytics to determine how to make it better for visitors. Perhaps you’ve determined that you want to develop revenue streams based on a ”freemium” subscription model, an Amazon affiliate program, and a custom job board geared to your readership. You’ve got your mobile site or app running and things are looking up.
As long as you put in the work of audience development and keep a steady stream of employers listing on your job board, your site will continue to grow and thrive. But you need to pay attention to your job search engine, because if it doesn’t work well, you could be limiting your site’s revenue and growth.
The Problems of an Unreliable Job Search Engine
If the search engine on your job board is unreliable or gives irrelevant results, several problems can result. First and foremost, people looking for jobs will become frustrated and may give up, giving them one less reason to visit your website. Second, if employers don’t get results, they’re less likely to continue listing on your job board, resulting in fewer listings over time. Third, if you offer advertising on your job board, advertisers may find ads underperforming, and they will be less likely to continue to advertise on your job board.
Advertisers and Your Job Board
Test out a job search engine, either on your own site, or on another site. What sorts of ads do you see in the search results when you search on a particular type of job? Say you search for ”medical” jobs in a particular city. Chances are, the ads that show up in the job search engine results will be for things like military healthcare opportunities, equipment used by healthcare workers, and medical equipment delivery services. In other words, an effective job search engine on your job board serves up not only relevant job listings, but also relevant advertisements.
How a Good Job Search Engine Helps Your Site
When your job board features an effective job search engine, you please job seekers, employers, and advertisers. Job seekers know that when they search for HR jobs in Duluth, Minnesota, they’ll receive relevant job listings they’re more likely to want to apply for. Employers will know that their listings on your job board will reach job seekers with relevant interests and skills. And advertisers on your job board know that they will be serving up ads that are relevant to the people searching your job listings. All these work together toward your site’s audience development and revenue development, so you can more effectively support the creation of the high quality content that brings people to your site to begin with.
Being able to show potential advertisers that they have multiple ways of offering ads on your site, whether through sponsored content, banner ads, or ads in your job search engine listings gives them good reason to want to work with you. But if your job search engine is ineffective, serving up ads in the results is a gamble for advertisers, because the ads served may or may not be relevant to the search.
When you choose to add a custom job board to your website as a revenue stream, you want employers to be confident that they are reaching the job seekers they want. RealMatch created TheJobNetwork, which is the most extensive recruitment ad network in the US. Without TheJobNetwork, employers often have to resort to multiple postings on multiple job boards to reach the job seekers they want. But with TheJobNetwork, employers make one job posting and receive the ultimate reach, with access to over 1,000 job sites that reach 100 million job seekers every month. With RealMatch, employers, advertisers, and job seekers get exactly what they want: a strong job matching engine (way more advanced than search) with highly relevant job match results, so nobody wastes time, money, or effort.
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