At the beginning of each new month, one of the things I like to track is the job search landscape across the major search engines. The job search landscape tells us the number of people who went out to a search engine and typed in a query that included the word “job”. For example every person that went out to Google and searched “Indiana Insurance Jobs” would be included in this as well as anybody who went out to Bing and searched “Jobs in Mechanical Engineering”. By watching this number, it can tell us a lot about the job market and how big the demand is for job related content on the internet. To derive this number I use two sources. The first is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This allows anybody to type in any word or phrase they can think of and it will spit out how many monthly searches are done on Google for this word or phrase. The second source I use is the comScore press release detailing the U.S. Search Engine Rankings.
The Google Adwords Keyword Tool allows me to tell how many monthly searches on Google contained the word “Job”. Then I take this information and combine it with the stat from comScore that says Google controls 66.7% of the U.S. Search Engine Traffic. From these two inputs and the assumption that people behave fairly similarly across all search engines I am able to determine the total number of job related searches done on search engines. Below is the information for June 2012.
| Job Search Landscape | ||||
| Month | Bing&Yahoo | Other | Total | |
| Jun-12 | 226,000,000 | 97,583,208 | 15,247,376 | 338,830,585 |
The table shows us that 338 Million people go out to a search engine on a monthly basis and search for job related content. That is a huge number and really shows the importance of having good SEO on your jobs. The search engines are the originators of a majority of the traffic. The more of the 338 Million that a company can win, the less they need to spend on job boards or job aggregators.
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