I look at tons of SEO job ads in case one ever looks like its worth going back to a regular salaried position. One particular wanted ad took the cake for unintentional comedy and was so ridiculous I decided to call them out.
The Ad
This particular Canadian company, opencare.com, was looking for a Senior SEO Specialist to run their entire search marketing efforts. Open Care connects people with local doctors, dentists, optometrists and more.
Not only was this person supposed to be in charge of strategy, site architecture, networking and 50 other things, they were supposed to “Grow and optimize millions of health provider profiles” (web pages) and blog multiple times per week. They also needed to achieve page one ranking for all relevant industry terms.
Among the prerequisite qualifications were needing to have added 100k monthly unique visitors per month. That probably cuts out 50-75% of SEO professionals right there.
In response, I sent them the following email. You’ll learn from this email that you cannot hire an SEO person to save your ass after you’ve completely screwed up your website and clearly don’t understand organic search marketing strategy or resource requirements.
The Problem
Let’s start with the fact that when I Google local healthcare providers or “local dentist ontario,” opencare.com is not even on page one or two.
The first is a phrase that is in your title tag, and the other one you have to rank for because it’s essentially your entire business model. (I switched to Google Canada, and could not find you. I also could not find you in the U.S.).
For not even being on the ground level with your SEO game plan (domain authority 42/100, page authority 51/100 – and by the way you have a duplicate content problem with opencare.com and opencare.com/search), you’re seeking someone who has added 100,000 unique visitors per month at their last job.
First of all, that would be an incredibly large and successful company, and it would take a team of SEO people and content writers to achieve. It happens all the time, it just takes a lot of money and smart people. I don’t see anywhere in this job ad that you have a team of writers and SEO people in place. In fact you state in the ad the person filling this position will develop blog posts. If this position is at all responsible for creating the content you need to add 100k people a month, you won’t hit your KPI’s.
Then there is the phrase “optimization of millions of pages.” The only way this is achievable is through profile creation hacks – meaning the SEO person explains to the engineers how to add/build things that will manipulate profile creators into putting the right keywords on their page, and ideally adding way more text. The problem here is that adding lots of content has to be optional for the profile creator or you will have a lot of healthcare business owners not wanting to make a profile because it takes too long.
“Develop the site-wide content architecture that will connect our database-driven and user-generated content with relevant queries.” It may be too late for you to achieve this, given that your platform is already built and your UX pathways/design are/is in no way setup to build Page Authority/acquire the massive amount of page views for each profile page to rank high.
The way your website is set up, the deepest anyone will go is to the make an appointment page. These pages are incredibly thin and shouldn’t have a long time spent on page average, a key SEO metric. For pages to rank, they need shares and comments too. Users need to be able to tweet out and Plus One Peter Dwight Shillingford’s local dentist page in Ontario Canada.
You’re simply not built in a way for your pages to rank. This is a huge problem given that without search, you’re probably toast.
My SEO Advice
Take the following free advice. Your URLs on the profile pages are insane looking – all numbers and letters – get your engineers to make the URLs auto-populate with keywords. Put share buttons on every page. Allow comments and reviews (key local SEO factors). Most importantly – merge all individual user profile pages together to make super pages – Google loves deep pages rich with information. Peter Dwight Shillingford should not have 4 separate urls hosting different Peter Dwight Shillingford content. By making super pages you also eliminate the shitty bounce rates each page is acquiring and increase time spent on page site wide.Now, for the love of God, start a rockin’ blog and hire 4 writers to create content daily, focused on local healthcare searches. Put the blog on your home page navigation. Add an email sign up CTA somewhere prominent. Start emailing out these blog posts so they will rank high. Last but not least, rewrite this job ad.
And feel free to call. I will literally go into your S.F. office and put on a clinic – from what I can tell, your lack of web traffic is probably an urgent problem. And how are you not doing social media?