Attracting Talent for Supermarket Roles
SEO Case Study
What we did
Client and objectives
- The John Lewis Partnership operate two much loved retail brands – John Lewis and Waitrose.
- Offering a high volume of new retail roles each year means that JLP must consistently attract suitable applicants, particularly in their peak pre-Christmas period.
- The client wanted to increase their organic visibility for priority Waitrose supermarket roles and reduce their dependence on more costly acquisition channels.
The challenge
- There was strong competition in search engines for primary target keywords such as “supermarket jobs”.
- Not only were JLP Jobs competing with other supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsburys, but job boards and aggregators such as Indeed and Reed were dominating the top positions in Google.
Our SEO approach
- We optimised the content of key roles pages across the careers site, including the supermarket assistants page.
- The user experience for important pages was enhanced with interactive video and refined FAQ content.
- New “job hub” pages were introduced to the careers site, to target location specific queries such as “supermarket jobs in Cambridge”. These pages featured a job module, which listed relevant vacancies.
The results
- Applications for JLP Jobs’ supermarket roles, referred by organic search, increased by 1115% YoY in the peak pre-Christmas period of 2023.
- Impressions for the supermarket assistants career page grew by +117% YoY, reaching 1.3m potential candidates in just a three-month period.
- There was also a +85% increase in the number of clicks from potential candidates searching “supermarket” related keywords.
Example of visibility increases in Google results pages
The image below shows how JLP Jobs rank ahead of key competitors such as Sainsburys, Tesco and Co-op for the term “supermarket jobs”.
