Has Cheezhead lost his mind, selling to Jobing.com?

Yesterday, September 9, 2009, Jobing.com announced the acquisition of the Cheezhead Group, with infamous HR blogger, Joel Cheesman.

Why would a Aaron Matos, CEO of Jobing.com, want to buy a notoriously outspoken blogger?

While the answer might seem strange, but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably the #1 reason.

Over the years, Jobing.com has been purchasing a lot of undervalued or distressed recruiting websites, including; Employocity, ColoradoJobs, JobSummit, the California Online Job Network, Rhinomite, Careers Colorado, LocalCareers Network, CanJobs.com, and WorkMetro.

Most of these properties were small and barely profitable websites, but they all had one thing in common, hundreds of very valuable job search related domain names.

OLD Jobing Strategy = Defense

In the past, Jobing’s purchasing of other websites and domain names seems to have been a defensive strategy. Buy the companies and domains, do some limited integration, but generally keep others from acquiring and competing on a local basis.

That strategy might finally be over.

New Strategy- Low cost Job Seeker and Employer Acquisition

Jobing now controls one of the largest collections of the most valuable job search related domain names. The value of these domain names has yet to be exploited to its full potential, from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standpoint.

Joel Chezman is one of the few people who could unlock the value in the thousands of domain names that Jobing.com now owns. Bringing Joel on board to integrate the SEO strategy is a great move.

Each month, there are over 150 million job related searches originated on Google.com. The majority of these searches lead job seekers to the largest job boards, who have made significant investments in search engine optimization (seo).

The top ranked career sites are using search to generate upwards of 50% of their job seeker traffic. Meanwhile, search is one of the lowest cost of job seeker and employer acquisition models.

SEO is a Zero Sum Game – Jobing stands to Win, and Big!

Search engine optimization is also a zero sum game, by integrating the domain into a search engine optimization network of job seeker eyeball-grabbing domains, Jobing could quickly pull millions of job seekers from competing national and local job boards. There are only 10 Top 10 positions, and the Top 1 ranked position can receive as much as 65% of the search traffic.

Currently, Jobing relies on one of the most expensive job seeker acquisition models, utilizing a lot of offline and outdoor advertising. Additionally, outdoor advertising attracts a blue collar labor workforce, while online advertising and marketing, including both SEO and SEM, attract a white collar workforce.

Bringing in a recruiting specific search engine optimization strategist to integrate and leverage thousands of highly valuable domain names makes a lot of sense. If this is Jobing’s strategy, which it seems to be, Jobing could expand nationally much quicker, with not only lowering its cost of marketing to job seekers and employers, but also doing this at the direct cost of its competitors.

In the end, I think this is a real win for Jobing and Cheesman.

There are more and more companies marketing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services in the HR  marketplace. While competition in any market is good. It is equally important, as a buyer, to know what you are buying.

Being successful with an HRSEO campaign takes designing a strategic plan, and implementing that plan with a partner who has proven SEO experience.

Scraping jobs from your ATS and putting those jobs on a micro site IS NOT Search Engine Optimization.

Building your Brand and driving candidates to your career site takes Researching keywords, and marketing the career site.

We wrote an article to help you get under way with creating goals for your HR SEO campaign. You can read the HRSEO Goal Setting article here.

Good luck with your campaign.

here’s lots of imitators trying to jump on the HR SEO bandwagon, but we think they always stop at least one step short.  Stop by booth 421- we’re by the food- and ask Jon or Fran why!

Thanks Joel!