Online job-related searches in the UK down 5 million: Greenlight survey
10 Mar 2010
London: 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.
Natural Search implies listings in search engine results pages that appear because of their natural relevance to the search terms, while paid search is 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 - Listings in search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms.
The report profiles search behaviour in this sector and assesses which brands, aggregators and websites are the most visible in natural and paid search results, and hence have the greatest share of consideration when UK-based searchers go to Google to find jobs. The report is based on search volumes for December 2009.
With 49 per cent 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 per cent of all job-specific terms in December. TotalJobs was the most visible website in the job-specific search term category, achieving 35 pe cent share of voice. It was followed by Reed and JobRapido with 26 per cent and 25 per cent visibility, respectively.
Generic keywords specifically made up 35 per cent of recruitment-related searches in December 2009. The term 'jobs' was searched for 1.5 million times, accounting for 51 per cent of all generic job searches. Monster was the most visible website for this category, attaining 64 per cent of visibility. JobCentrePlus followed with 60 per cent then Reed with 52 per cent.
Location-specific keyword searches accounted for 16 per cent of all job-related searches. 'London jobs' accounted for 27 per cent of location-specific search terms. Bristol, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham each accounted for 5 per cent. Gumtree was by far the most visible website attaining 68 per cent 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 per cent and 21 per cent 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 pe cent, 39 per cent and 29 per cent 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 per cent share of voice. The ad creative was salary-specific incentivising the consumer, stating: 'Earn up to £28 / hr'.
| Table: Top 5 of the 60 most visible recruitment websites in paid search, UK | |||
| Category | No. | Advertiser | per cent share of voice |
| Paid Search | 1 | totaljobs.com | 65 per cent |
| 2 | ukmysteryshopperjobs.com | 39 per cent | |
| 3 | jobsite.co.uk | 29 per cent | |
| 4 | jobs.guardian.co.uk | 29 per cent | |
| 5 | reed.co.uk | 28 per cent | |
| Source: Greenlight | |||
Total Jobs was the only brand to achieve strong integrated search visibility as it attained considerable share of voice in both natural and paid search.
