What's that?
Oh, you want to know how to get your website running
for over two million keywords?
I got you.
[SWISH]
[BEEPING]
Glassdoor did it, and we're going to show you how.
[SLOW RHYTHMIC MUSIC PLAYING]
What's up?
It's Jamal from HubSpot.
Glassdoor's masterful SEO strategy
has made it the number one search result for over 130,000
keywords.
That is more words than I know.
In this video, we're going to take a look
at some of the SEO techniques Glassdoor used to grow
into job search behemoth.
Just hulking around.
Ho, ho, ho.
I love keywords.
[LAUGHS] You know?
They're crazy.
If you find this video useful, give it a like,
and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel.
And check out our Academy Course on building backlinks,
so that you can rival Glassdoor.
[SWISH]
Despite a slowdown due to Covid-19,
the global online recruiting market was worth $25.1 billion
last year.
Glassdoor is the number two job site on the internet,
with over 70 million monthly visitors,
who come to search almost six million job postings.
The only bigger site is Indeed.com.
And the two became sister companies
when Glassdoor was acquired by the same parent company
in 2018, for $1.2 billion.
What a family!
That payday came after a decade of excellent SEO strategy
that included cultivating backlinks and optimizing
for organic search.
[SLOW MYSTERIOUS MUSIC PLAYING]
It also included one controversial--
[POP] --technique, that we're going to reveal
in just a few minutes.
[SLOW RHYTHMIC MUSIC PLAYING]
Let's take a look at Glassdoor's backlinks, 255 million
of them coming from almost 100,000 domains.
Marketer, Ross Simmonds from Foundation,
calls this an SEO Moat.
Meaning that it's almost impossible for anyone else
to come along and take the site's SERP placement.
[SLOW MUSIC PLAYING]
That's such a funny idea for a moat, though.
Can you just imagine, it's just that water's just URLs,
that it's spacious, you know?
Simmonds, you have a vivid mind.
[SLOW RHYTHMIC MUSIC PLAYING]
Of course, Glassdoor is more than just a job site.
When it launched in 2008, the company
described itself as a career and workplace community,
where anyone can go to find, and anonymously
share real-time in reviews, ratings and salary details
about specific jobs in specific companies.
[SWIPE]
That very first press release included
some fascinating statistics, including some like, only 24%
of employees feel comfortable talking about compensation
with their boss, and 59% wish they had a better understanding
of fair market compensation.
Those numbers are interesting on their own,
but it also reveals that Glassdoor understood the power
of data from the beginning.
In the 13 years since its launch,
the company has amassed a huge amount of data generated
by its users, and it leverages that data to create
content that builds backlinks.
This works because releasing new statistics
in the form of reports, blog posts, or info-graphics
encourages other blogs, news sources, and social media
to share this information, and link back to the source.
Hey, tell your sources.
[SWIPE]
I'll be reading your bibliography.
The only person ever to do that.
Glassdoor had done this especially well,
dating all the way back to 2009, when
it released its very first, 50 Best Places to Work awards.
The scores were based on user ratings of companies
on Glassdoor, turning data-at-hand into lots
of earned attention.
How much attention?
Well, the 2021 Best Places to Work Survey
has earned a whopping 37,000 backlinks.
That includes over 20,000 links from Kaiser Permanente, who
probably boasts about their inclusion
every single page of their career site.
You know who else takes pride in their ranking on Glassdoor?
HubSpot, who made the list--
[POPS]
--five of the past six years, including number one in 2020!
[CLAPS]
Wow!
Let's go, baby!
That's why I'm working here.
Lists of any kind are a great way
to encourage backlinks from those featured on the list.
In addition to its annual Best Places to Work content,
Glassdoor consistently posts items
like, highest paying jobs--
[SWISH]
--highest rated CEOs, and even the best paying internships.
All of these are backlink catnip--
[MEOWING]
--generating tens of thousands of links,
often from high authority sites like The New York Times,
Yahoo News, and Bloomberg.
SEO experts believe that Google uses relevant links,
from high quality sites, to gauge
the relevance and quality of importance of your own website.
In general, the more high-authority backlinks
your site has, the more competitive
your pages will be in search results.
Authority doesn't just come from the biggest websites, though.
The world's most popular cycling websites, Cycling News,
has an authority score of 70, which
is the highest in its category.
So if your business sells bike seats,
a backlink from Cycling News is incredibly
valuable to your SEO.
Remember, you don't have to be the best on the internet,
you only have to compete in your category.
And what if you don't have any big data to turn it to backlink
catching statistics?
Consider commissioning studies that
can help your overall business strategy,
and turn those findings into stats worth sharing.
Back to Glassdoor.
Saturation media isn't the only way
the site built SEO supremacy.
[CA-CHING]
They also--
[CA-CHING]
--use their extensive trove of salary data
to create thousands of automated landing
pages with the salary info for various job descriptions.
Some of these pages generate a lot of backlinks.
The one that gets the most?
Data scientists salaries, with 1,500 backlinks
from 500 domains.
Guess those data scientists like to check the data.
[ZANY MUSIC PLAYING]
[LAUGHS]
[SLOW RHYTHMIC MUSIC PLAYING]
More importantly, these salary pages
show up at the very top of Google's search results,
in a special salary widget.
So whether you search data scientist salary,
or social media manager salary, or truck driver salary,
Glassdoor is right at the top of the results.
Huge.
But remember, not everyone uses those exact search terms.
Users might also ask, how much does a truck driver make?
In that case, Glassdoor isn't even on the first results page.
That's OK because the search volume for, truck drivers
salary, is much higher, for now.
But as voice search continues to grow with tools like Siri,
and Alexa, Gemba, even.
Who knows?
Conversational keywords like, how much
does a truck driver make, will become much more common.
If you want to learn more about voice search,
check out HubSpots Skillup podcasts.
There's a link down in the description below.
If anyone from Glassdoor is watching,
you guys should give it a listen too,
even the biggest companies can use some SEO TLC sometimes.
But Glassdoor has one trick up its sleeve.
In addition to data-driven content and landing pages,
Glassdoor does plenty of conventional service-oriented
blogging.
Articles like, 11 Recession Proof Jobs,
and 9 Attention Grabbing Cover Letters get plenty of organic
search results and backlinks from reputable sites like
NIH.gov--
[SWIPE]
--and GitHub.
But here's where it gets a little controversial.
[DING]
Two dozen of those blog posts average more than four million
backlinks each.
That accounts for roughly 40% of Glassdoor's 255 million
total backlinks.
[SWIPES]
When checking the source of those links,
we discovered that they almost all
come from pages on five of Glassdoor's
international sites.
Glassdoor.sg Singapore.
[POP]
Glassdoor.hk, Hong Kong.
[POP]
Glassdoor.co.in, India.
[POP]
Glassdoor.au, Australia.
[POP]
And Glassdoor.nz, New Zealand.
Glassdoor actually runs 23 sites with international CCTLD,
or Country Code Top Level Domains,
with each site localized for content and language.
This is a clear advantage for any company
seeking international reach.
But starting a new website on a separate country code, often
means restarting or going backwards in the authority
building journey, so you have to balance the pros and cons.
We can see that one blog post, 50 Most Common Interview
Questions, has more than 850,000 backlinks coming from
Glassdoor.sg to the post, on the .com site.
Separate analysis found 1.8 million backlinks
to the same blog post from Glassdoor's India site.
We initially assumed that some widget
on the international pages-- maybe
Top 25 Blog Posts-- might be sending all
this traffic between domains.
But we searched a couple of dozen of the referring pages,
and couldn't find the actual links
to the blog posts on the page, or in the source code.
[MYSTERIOUS MUSIC PLAYING]
Sourcey.
So where are all of these backlinks coming from,
and are they actually helping Glassdoor's overall search
ranking?
Glassdoor, if you want to tell us, I'll keep it a secret,
you know what I mean?
It'll just be between you and me and your backlinks, you know?
I won't tell anybody.
[SLOW RYTHMIC MUSIC PLAYING]
But before you get any big ideas about gaming the algorithm--
and we're not saying Glassdoor is gaming anything-- just
remember that backlinks are only valuable if they
come from a reputable website.
Anyone who tries to sell you backlinks,
is definitely not from reputable anything.
Like the rest of SEO, there are no
shortcuts to building backlinks, but there are best practices.
HubSpot Academy offers an entire training course
on how to backlinks, you can find the link
in the description below.
And when it comes to Glassdoor, best
believe they're doing everything right to build SEO moat,
and fill it with backlinks.
And as I said, I mean, the moat's
probably pretty spacious.
[CHEERING]
You know what I mean?
I feel I'm going to host a party out there.
But a raft, bring a bathing suit, maybe a drink or two.
Water, of course.
What's that?
You're going to go hang out in the moat?
OK.
[LAUGHS] We'll see you in there.
Yes!
The power, [LAUGHS] the power.
[SIGHS] I need help.