The number of job-related searches conducted online by UK consumers dropped by over 5 million between October and December 2009, reveals a new report by Greenlight, the UK’s leading independent search marketing agency. 8.4 million job-related searches were made online in December, a considerable decrease on 13.8 million in October. The report, ‘Recruitment Sector Report – Issue 1’, the first of a quarterly series, classified 3,300 of the most popular keywords used by UK consumers to look for jobs online. It included generic, job and location specific terms, to determine the 60 most visible websites and brands for related searches in natural search* and the most prominent in paid search.**
With 49% share, job-specific terms were the most queried, accounting for over 4.1 million searches made in December. ‘Sales jobs’, ‘IT jobs’ and ‘Engineering jobs’ were searched for 110,000 times each cummulatively accounting for 9% of all job-specific terms in December. TotalJobs was the most visible website in the job-specific search term category, achieving 35% share of voice. It was followed by Reed and JobRapido with 26% and 25% visibility, respectively.
Generic keywords specifically made up 35% of recruitment-related searches in December 2009. The term ‘jobs’ was searched for 1.5 million times, accounting for 51% of all generic job searches. Monster was the most visible website for this category, attaining 64% of visibility. JobCentrePlus followed with 60% then Reed with 52%.
Location-specific keyword searches accounted for 16% of all job-related searches. ‘London jobs’ accounted for 27% of location-specific search terms. Bristol, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham each accounted for 5%. Gumtree was by far the most visible website attaining 68% visibility. This it achieved through ranking at page one, position one of Google for 10 of the most searched for keywords analysed. Londonjobs and JustLondonJobs followed with 31% and 21% share of visibility, respectively.
In paid search and across all key term searches, TotalJobs, UKMysteryShopperJobs and Jobsite were the top three most visible recruitment advertisers, attaining 65%, 39% and 29% visibility, respectively. Of the top 10 advertisers, seven were recruitment agencies, two were multi-channel websites (Gumtree and The Guardian) and one was a government website (direct.gov.uk).
Greenlight determined which ad creatives featured most frequently across the top 90 job-related keywords in the Google paid search space. Share of voice is based on the number of times Google displayed the individual ad creative, also taking into account ad position, search term volume and Google’s ad rotation. In addition Greenlight analysed how many unique creatives were present for each advertiser in December.
UKMysteryShopperJobs featured the most visible individual ad creative in paid search, achieving 39% share of voice. The ad creative was salary-specific incentivising the consumer, stating: ‘Earn up to £28/hr’.
*Natural Search - Listings in search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms.
**Paid Search – an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.
