Planning The Perfect Customer Service Job Advert

If you're recruiting for customer service jobs, poor visibility on a web search could mean that your ideal candidate might miss your advertisement altogether.

Choosing the right customer service job board (as discussed in the previous article) will really help with how visible your job ad is on search engines. At the same time, there are lots of things you can do in planning your advertisement that will make your customer service job vacancies even more 'find-able'. Here's a quick checklist:

5 steps to planning the best ads for customer service jobs.

1. Keyword research. Find out what key words and phrases your candidates are most likely to be searching on using Google's keyword tool. Getting your terms wrong by just one little word like 'in' or 'for' can make a difference of thousands and thousands of hits. For instance the term 'jobs in customer service' (which we're in position 2 on Google!) has a global monthly search volume of 673,000 hits, whereas 'jobs for customer services' has just 3,600. Once you know what terms are most popular, adapt your job title or job description to include the relevant phrasing.

2. Job title. The term you most want Google to see should be your first entry. Your most significant term will be the customer service job title which you should enter without abbreviations e.g. Customer Service Manager.

3. Job location and salary. Next enter location and salary, so that along with the job title it will appear as the 'title tag' or 'clickable link' on a Google page. What's this? Pop any term you like into Google right now. The 20 or so descriptive words under each entry is the 'clickable link'.

4. Job description. Google typically shows 155 characters worth of text under each title tag, so, to encourage your candidate to click further, include a concise and enticing job description within this limit, together with the customer service job title, location and salary.

5. When uploading to job boards, make sure you think about their own search criteria. For example, when you upload to a vacancy to Jobs in customer service, we'll ask you for various information like job description and job skills. This forms an internal profile for your job. If the terms you use match the criteria set by more of our candidates, your job will get seen more often.

If you haven't been involved with search engine techniques, this list could look a little daunting, but don't be put off. Take half an hour to have a play, and you'll soon see that these tips are quick and easy to apply, and could significantly improve the number and quality of applications you get for your customer service job vacancies from now on.