SEO and HR Strategy: Using Search Tools to Improve Your Human Resources

Have you ever wondered what your employees really think about your company?

Of course, you have. You probably do surveys and ask for feedback on exit interviews. We all do, but we all also know that these surveys aren’t always the most successful.

So how can you really know what people think? Well, don’t ask them!

Analyzing the behavior of people without letting them know that you are doing so is honestly the best way to get accurate information. (This is because of a phenomena known as the Hawthorne effect.) And no, I’m not talking about installing robots or AI into the brains of your employees! I’m talking about using the everyday search tools I use in my marketing job to analyze what employees are searching for in regards to your company.

Over the past several years, people have become more and more reliant on search engines to seek the knowledge they desire.

When was the last time you searched for something? For me, it was just this morning. I wanted to know the difference between a poached egg and one sunny-side up. Anyway, you get my point; we are overly reliant on search engines. And this has created a vast amount of data around exactly what people are searching for, how many times they are searching for it, and at what times throughout the year they are searching for it.

This is amazing for HR professionals. If you work for a decently sized company, I can guarantee that your employees are searching about things related to your Human Resources strategy.

Here’s how to find and use that data.

SEO and HR Strategy

Using Search Engine Research Tools for HR

There are tons of search engine research tools. My favorite is ahrefs. I’ve used several of these tools before, and ahrefs is the best. It has the most accurate data and is the easiest to use. (In my humble opinion.)

Ahrefs has two tools that will be useful for our purposes: the site explorer and the keyword explorer.

To use their site explorer, plug in the URL of your career page on the explore tab. If you want to see just the results for this URL, select that in the drop down. If you want to see what keywords your entire website ranks for, select all domains.

You’ll see a list of results that show what keywords your page ranks for and how many searches those keywords get. This could be:

“company name + Benefits”

“company name + Salary”

And so on.

So what can you do with this information?

If you see that you are ranking for a certain keyword, such as “company name layoffs,” you might have an employer brand problem on your hands. If you rank for “company name leadership development” this could be an indication that your current employees, and future, are hungry for leadership development opportunities.

Now, go to the Keywords Explorer tab in ahrefs.

Type in your company’s name. (If you have different variations on the company name, such as “IBM” vs “International Business Machines,” make sure you do this process for each version.)

You will see a page show up with a bunch of numbers in reference to the difficulty and amount of searches for your company. Pretty cool—but not necessarily useful for an HR professional.

Go to the “Having same terms” section, and click through to see all of the strings that your company is included in.

In this section, you are going to see things completely unrelated to HR, but you will also see strings of text that are super relevant.

Things like:

“Amazon low wages” or “Nike sabbatical program”

If you are a big company, there could be thousands of results, so set aside some time to actually sort through them all. Save terms that are relevant to you in a list to review later.

So what can you do with this information? There are a few action items from this exercise that can definitely impact your HR strategy:

First, if someone is searching for something related to your HR strategy, it is a big red flag that your company needs to start doing something, continue to do something, or stop doing something, depending on what the results are. Visit the pages that rank for these keywords, and see what people are saying in relation to your company to determine an accurate course of action.

Take the keywords, and maybe send out a survey to your employees to see how they feel about the parts of your HR strategy that they relate to.

Finally, if people are searching a lot for something related to your company, and you don’t have any information out there about it, you should make it a priority to do so. This could be the deciding factor for a candidate trying to decide whether or not they should accept a job at your company.

Using Google Trends for HR

Google Trends is a really cool tool that allows you to pull data on the volume history of certain keyword searches. This can be useful when looking to see if different HR initiatives were impactful to your employees.

Just type in a keyword string and hit search! You can expand the timeline all the way back to 2004 by monthly history.

Here is a really cool example of how this tool works:

My current company sells outplacement to other organizations. Our business is greatly affected by the economy. When the economy is doing well and business is booming, fewer companies are having layoffs, meaning there’s a decreased need for outplacement. When the economy is bad, on the other hand, more companies layoff employees, thus resulting in more companies needing outplacement.

So, when you plug in “outplacement” into the Google Trends tool, what do you see?

A huge spike in 2008 when the recession hit. Which makes sense—businesses had a horrible time during the recession and were forced to make cuts, resulting in layoffs. And what do companies give employees they layoff? Outplacement!

While these searches can tell you a lot about the current state of the market you’re in, I would pay special attention to keywords directly related to your HR strategy, and see if you can identify different trends. Hypothesize on why certain keywords trend at certain times in the year, or even over the past ten years.

Did you start a leadership development program? Check and see if there was a spike or decline in traffic related to your leadership development program that can identify a success or failure on part of the program. Do the same thing with your vacation policies, compensation strategies, etc.

The Final Say

There is a ton of marketing technology out there that is applicable to the Human Resources space. Search engine tools are a great way to monitor what your employees, potential future employees, and the general public think about your company.

Start out with these simple hacks, and you will reap the rewards with your HR strategy!