The irony is the one piece of advice job adverts seem to follow is part of the right advice – to thread your content with key words.

After all searching on a job board is much like searching for other commodity items on Amazon.

Look for Bluetooth headphones on Amazon, and you won’t buy the ones that say “my favourite BESTEVA” headphones – I’ll buy the ones that are waterproof with 8hr battery life at £17.99.

You might have different criteria, and will buy the ones that give you what you need.

Yet keywords are just one of the legs of the table that is content SEO. And as we know a table with one leg is likely to fall over.

What makes up the pillars of Search Engine Optimisation for content?

- Quality of content. SEO is about building trust and acting as an authority in your space
- Keywords obvs
- Recency – do applicants apply to old adverts?
- Relevance – what is the reader looking for, what do they need to know?
- User experience – the readability, ease of access and flow of content

Think about employing the principles of content SEO in your adverts and you’ll write a better advert as a starting point.

You can go further.

Employ Conversation Rate Optimisation (CRO) into your content using the principles of reader psychology and calls to action. Good listings on e-commerce sites do this – why can’t you?

Use AIDA (attention interest desire action) the classic advertising model.

Smash your content up with the So What stick? Get rid of unnecessary gumpf and the words that push readers away (here’s looking at you “applicants who do not hear from us in three days must assume we hate them” or whatever).

And tell the reader what’s in it for them.

I filled a job from an advert on a generic board using these principles on Friday, for a vacancy in a very candidate short marketplace.

What's stopping you?