Indeed vs Google in 2019
I’ve been meaning to get this blog kicked off in earnest for some years now. Some recent news is what really got me motivated to finally get this blog live, and the news is closely connected to the title of this post.
The answer to the question is none other than…Google itself.
If you think about it, it’s as obvious as the nose on your face. Indeed, now a juggernaut which is taking to radio ads, becoming an ATS, moving to acquire as many direct employer accounts as possible — oddly enough when Indeed launched at its inception you couldn’t even post a job directly, rather they aggregated jobs from existing job boards, offered free traffic in return and out maneuvered job boards in organic search results with great SEO and awesome execution — ultimately dominating Google search results (by the way more on this in another post…).
In short, a textbook example of a company benefiting off the good luck and graces of Googles search dominance.
While many job sites such as Indeed, or Craigslist, have gained such status that job seekers may surf straight to them first (direct traffic), let’s not forget how the masses search for anything transactional online — they start at Google.com. If you think about it, Google is not only the largest job site (by far), it’s the largest real estate site, car buying site, local deals site. In short, the king of what used to be the back of the newspaper classifieds, and the yellow pages.
There are huge players within verticals in those categories, publicly-traded companies, but Google dwarfs them, and in fact most are reliant on Google for traffic, since users start their searches at Google, then find these sites within Google’s results.
The news of Google’s new Job Site no question will affect Indeed significantly. Why? Indeed has become the master of jobs SEO. Not only do you typically find Indeed at the top of most job searches, but you will frequently see multiple Indeed results within these job searches on Google (not a great user experience). What’s more, Indeed has mastered getting top placement in these very competitive job searches with a search result of its own. Who knows how much Google was concerned that its automated algorithm returned results which included yet more results, which is generally considered bad practice in SEO. Remember, Google wants the user to get to the end result as FAST as possible, they don’t want a user having to do yet again another search.
Because Indeed dominates search results to the extreme, and it appears Google Job Search will be serving up actual jobs in the results now (what users actually want to find when they search)…
Indeed stands to lose a lot with this development.
This seemed to be resonated last week with the response of Indeed to this announcement, which appeared to be less than welcoming. As large as Indeed is, apparently it receives a good deal of traffic from Google, the vast majority of which is free. The value of free traffic for a site charging $3 — $4 click, or more, to its employers, has to be crucial to margins of what is now a company employing 5,000. And let’s not forget this free traffic, it’s more than 39% of their traffic, it drives email alert registrations, app downloads, and more. So when you really dive into their numbers how much of their other activity originates from the good luck of free Google Traffic? A lot more than 39%, no doubt.
There have been instances of Google making a big impact on large companies time and again with changes in the amount of search traffic it delivers.
It will be very interesting to see how the world’s biggest job site, Google.com, that few realized was the dominant #1, moves forward with this increased effort.
It’s almost like Google woke up and realized, “Hey, we are actually the top job site, let’s show people who the real #1 is when we service jobseekers ourselves.”
- Jake @ Get It
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