Finding a great SEO specialist isn’t the easiest task. It’s a field that requires both hard skills and a creative mindset, so superb talent is few and far between.
Here’s a trick to finding the best of the best — run SEO webinars and pitch your job opening to the participants. Why does it work?
Unlike computer programming, where a line of code that works now will still work in ten years, SEO is a field that’s prone to change and irregularity.
That’s why the best SEO specialists are always learning something new about their job, looking for new strategies, and trying to find out what works for others. They’ll be attending your webinar, wremotehich makes it the perfect place to offer them a job.
An SEO webinar is an online event where the host either describes the basics of an SEO concept or goes into detail on some particular aspect of it. It's typically done with data from the host’s practice, which makes it more engaging.
What is there to learn, why should you create one, and how to hire the right people? Read on, and in ten minutes, you’ll be planning a webinar with these tips in mind.
Benefits of SEO Webinars
Conducting an SEO webinar can be a great way to find the right person for your marketing department. Here’s why.
A new source of SEO candidates
The most obvious benefit of conducting an SEO webinar is that the participants can become the candidates. A webinar centered around educating listeners on a particular aspect of SEO is sure to get the attention of SEO specialists. When you have ten, twenty, or fifty specialists who want to learn more about their craft on the group call, you can pitch your vacancy to the listeners.
The main trick here is to choose the right SEO topic. If you’re doing this webinar with the main goal of attracting potential candidates, you have to educate the participants about something they don't already know.
That's why it’s a bad idea to run a webinar on the basics of SEO to find candidates fit to be Head of SEO. A better topic would be the management of SEO teams — you can ask an expert from another company to lead the webinar if you don’t have any experts on your team.
Improve candidate quality
The candidates you get from the webinar are likely to be better professionals, too. For starters, people who took some of their free time to learn more about their craft are more interested in developing as professionals. This already makes them better candidates because in SEO one of the most important qualities is the ability to learn fast and keep in touch with industry trends.
Increased online visibility
Webinars can potentially increase your online visibility as well, and not just on social media. There are three major ways that running a webinar and creating a dedicated web page can expose you to more people:
- Making an announcement on event websites, social media, or third-party websites ensures more people know about the webinar and are able to consider joining. It also increases your online visibility and may help with boosting brand recognition.
- When your webinar has gone live, and you’ve posted a recording, other websites might link to it. If it’s good material, you may get a lot of mentions across the web in blogs and discussions — this will affect your online visibility too. This not only exposes you to the audiences viewing these websites but also improves your SEO.
- When you do a bit of SEO work, your webinar page might start appearing on SERPs. This will give you a great deal of online visibility and brand recognition.
Getting your page with the webinar recording onto the search engine results pages might be one of the best ways to bring more candidates to your company. You may struggle to get more than a hundred people to sign up for your webinar, while thousands can view the webinar page.
To assess your chances of appearing on SERPs, you can use an SEO tool like SERPs Checker from SE Ranking. The tool will check the SERP for several keywords of your choice and present an analysis of the competitors for that keyword. This could include any of the dozens of metrics available, like page quality score or the number of referring domains linking to a page.
It also shows a list of organic competitors so you can do further analysis on your own. Use this information to build an SEO strategy for your webinar page.
Receive referrals
Realistically speaking, the only drawback of webinars for recruitment is that you can’t expect to host a lot of people. The good news is that the people who listen to the webinar online aren’t your only audience.
Apart from reaching more people by recording the webinar and posting it online, you can also get referrals from participants. Don't expect all of the people on the webinar to apply, but those who don’t want to apply to your position might know somebody who’s looking for work at the moment.
SEO is a tight-knit community with hundreds of folks sharing their knowledge and experience on LinkedIn or closed Facebook groups. The odds are that SEO specialists who attend your webinar might either send your job opening to their acquaintances or share it in an SEO chat. Either way, you’ll be receiving a new applicant.
Expand candidate geographics
And lastly, meeting prospective candidates over a video call expands the geographic location of your candidates. Posting a job on a website like Indeed is often constricted by location, and you might not get exposure to top talent from a neighboring state or country.
If you promote your SEO webinars well, you’ll be sure to attract participants from all corners of the globe, increasing your chances of finding a great hire.
Naturally, this is only beneficial if your company is okay with fully remote work.
How to Host an SEO Webinar
If you want to receive a lot of applications to find your ideal candidate, you need to make your webinar as great as possible. Here’s how to do it.
Choose a topic
Choosing the topic is the most important step in finding a good candidate for a webinar. There are hundreds of topics that SEO specialists can be interested in and finding the right one to cover your needs at the moment may prove to be hard.
The rule of thumb is to aim for a topic that will be interesting to the type of person you’re looking for.
- If you’re hiring a specialist in a narrow field like link building, outreach, or keyword research specialist, make the topic of the webinar fit their professional interest.
- Aim for a topic that is within their sphere of interest but is one step above their current position. I.e., you don’t want to run an SEO basics webinar to attract a Head of SEO.
- Consult with your current SEO specialists or talk to a professional you know to find out what that topic might be for your specific vacant position.
Invite speakers
Some of you may already have a great SEO specialist on board and do not have to look for speakers. Your employee could run the webinar on their own, and that would be enough.
However, if you don’t have any experienced SEO people on your team or you like to make webinars with several folks on board, you’ll have to invite someone.
Here’s how to find them.
- Look for people who post a lot on LinkedIn on topics related to your webinar. You can quickly assess whether they’re a professional or not, and people who are active on social media may be more eager to participate in a webinar.
- Reach out to SEO agencies including a SaaS SEO agency to see whether anyone is interested in leading a webinar.
- Reach out to companies similar to yours, one of their SEO specialists may be interested in participating in exchange for a bit of a promotion for their company.
- Make sure the person you choose is a professional with a decent level of experience.
- Make sure they specialize in the topic you’re bringing up. It may not be a good idea to bring in a Head of SEO to talk about a very niche topic like tracking outreach efforts — they may not know all the details.
When you’ve found the right person, take time to plan the webinar together. There’s always a little room for improvisation, especially when answering questions, but you also want to make sure the webinar has some structure.
This ensures your participants get great content with the latest YouTube trends and will be more likely to reach out afterward and apply for a job.
Create a webinar page and optimize it for organic search
When that’s out of the way, start by creating a webinar page. For now, it’s going to be an announcement page, but you can upload the webinar recording and transcript later on to reap more benefits.
Do some keyword research and find out what the perfect long-tail keyword is for the page. For instance, if you’re doing a webinar on managing an off-page SEO team, the keyword might be “how to do outreach in-house.”
Mention it in the title, H1, meta description, and a few times in the page copy.
Then, start building links to it. Place a link on event announcement websites and on social media. Add a couple of internal links too — you can link to the webinar announcement from the fresh content you put out or from the pages that receive the most traffic. The link building benefits for this purpose include amplifying the visibility of your SEO webinar, as quality backlinks signal search engines about the relevance and credibility of your content.
Promote your webinar with paid ads and on social media
The point above is more about getting the page ready for future success on SERPs. It won’t bring in a lot of attendees fast enough, so you need to do a bit of promotion on channels that can.
- Advertise the webinar page to your newsletter subscribers
- Post about it on social media. LinkedIn is the most important platform here
- If you have invited a speaker, ask them to share the webinar as well
- Consider running paid ads to promote it
The key here is to start early, otherwise, you might not attract that many visitors.
Success with your webinar
After all of the above, all you have to do is run the webinar. Give readers valuable information, and don’t forget to mention that you’re hiring SEO specialists.
Leave the attendees with clear instructions on how to proceed with the application, encourage them, and make sure you ask them to share the vacancy with their friends who might be looking for work.
When you’re doing the webinar, record it. Then, you can post the recording and the transcript on the page. If it ends up being lengthy, you can edit it down to the essentials. Then, the page can become your linkable asset.
Do some content distribution, and if it’s good enough, it will start acquiring backlinks, which is a net positive for your online presence.
If it acquires a lot of backlinks but doesn’t receive a lot of traffic, you can either merge it with another page or use it for internal linking.
If it does get traffic, you can either use it to find more SEO candidates or add a CTA upselling one of your services if you’ve already closed all the positions.
Tips for processing candidates from an SEO webinar
Now that you have a few dozen applications, let’s see how you can find the person who will become a part of your company.
A more straightforward hiring process
One of the most interesting benefits of using SEO webinars for recruitment is that the quality of candidates is going to be much higher than with regular methods. Since you’re only exposed to candidates who are interested in learning about SEO, and the pool of talent is going to be smaller, you won’t have to sort through hundreds of resumes.
You can screen the resumes you receive for years of experience, previous roles, and location, but other than that, you won’t have to do a lot of screening.
Personal qualities to look for
One key aspect of SEO is that it’s prone to change. Google updates the search algorithms regularly, and some of these updates can change SEO quite significantly. So you want to find a person who can adapt to changes quickly.
To find a quick and creative learner among your candidates, ask them what they would change in the SEO strategy if Google were to change the algorithm one way or another.
A creative person will try to find a couple of solutions to the new problem in the interview.
Another type of SEO specialist you might want on your team is the practical one. To the question above, they’d answer “I would wait, look at the websites that went to the top, and try to see what they did differently.”
Now, what you don’t want is a stubborn SEO. If a person insists they know the one and the only way SEO works and won’t change it at all, they won’t be able to adapt when it inevitably changes.
SEO tech skills
Since SEO is closely interlinked with your website, you want your SEO specialist to know a bit of programming. They don’t have to write code (unless you don’t have an IT team, then it would be a great perk), but they have to understand how frontend and backend work, at least broadly.
In terms of tools, the bare minimum is:
- Google Analytics
- Google Sheets
- Email automation software like Mailchimp
- General SEO research software like SE Ranking
Depending on the role, you might want to add other niche-specific tools.
What education do you need for SEO specialists?
Now, education isn’t as important for SEO specialists. It’s not something that people learn in a university, it’s more of a practical, often self-taught skill. So while a Bachelor’s degree in media communications or marketing might be a great addition to a portfolio, don’t make it a must-have.
What you can look for are certifications. When hiring for junior roles, it’s great to see a basic Google or Moz certification course on the resume. This lets you know you won’t have to teach a new hire the very basics.
For higher roles, it’s best to look for tool-specific certifications, like the Google Analytics Certification. There aren’t that many high-level courses that teach so much SEO theory that a good specialist will learn a ton from, but knowing they know their tools is a good way to feel safer about hiring them.
Conclusion
SEO is a complicated subject and a complicated niche to find a good candidate. If you want the best, you may have to resort to unorthodox measures. Case in point — running an SEO webinar to attract candidates.
Hosting a webinar that educates your future employees can be a great way to both spread awareness about a job and increase the quality of your candidates. People interested in learning more about their craft will always make better employees.
But don’t just create a webinar to get your dream hire. It can have multiple uses. You can find your next SEO hire, spread awareness about your brand, and gain search visibility.