Saramin increased organic Search traffic 2x by investing in SEO

Published on April 8, 2020

Challenge

Saramin, one of the largest job platforms in Korea, offers job posting recommendations, company and salary information, AI-based interviews, and AI-based headhunting services. People come to the Saramin site not only to look for jobs and submit applications, but to also gain a variety of information related to job searches and receive high-quality AI-based services for interview preparation.

In 2015, Saramin registered their site on Google Search Console. In the first year, they focused on checking crawling errors and fixed issues to ensure that the Googlebot is crawling the site for proper indexing. The task was simple but still resulted in a 15% increase in the organic traffic, and Saramin thought more investment in SEO can bring greater success.

15%

Increase in the organic traffic

Solution

The marketers and website owners at Saramin started following the SEO and Search Console guidelines more closely and implemented more changes. The goal was to make changes to the site so that Google Search would better understand it. The first task involved removing meta tags that were cluttered with unnecessary and unhelpful keywords. They used canonical URLs and removed duplicate content. They explored the search gallery and applied applicable structured data, starting with JobPosting, Breadcrumb, and Estimated salary.

When Saramin's marketing team first started looking into SEO, it was a challenge to learn all the technical terms and tackle issues that were new to them. So they thoroughly studied the Google Search developer's guide and Help Center articles and found answers to their problems. These resources continue to provide up-to-date information for issues that they run into.

In addition, they used various Google tools offered as they worked on improving their site. "Errors on our structured data are dealt with by checking URLs on the Structured Data Testing Tool. Other tools like Mobile Friendly Test, AMP Test, and PageSpeed Insight provide us valuable insights for making improvements and helping us offer a better experience for our users," said Moon Tae Sung, Saramin's SEO Manager who led the SEO initiative at Saramin.

Results

Over the course of the next few months, Saramin saw the red-colored errors on the Search Console's Coverage graph gradually turning valid green, and they knew they were headed in the right direction. The incremental changes reached a tipping point and the traffic continued to rise at a more dramatic speed. In the peak hiring season of September 2019, traffic doubled from the previous year.

102%

Increase Year-Over-Year (YOY) in organic traffic from Google Search during the hiring season in 2019

Breadcrumb structured data in Search Console

"We are very happy about the traffic increase, but what's more exciting is it also accompanied improvement in the quality of the traffic. We saw a 93% increase in the number of new sign ups and a 9% increase on the conversion. We believe this means Saramin's optimization work was found delightful by our users," said Tae Sung.

93%

Increase in new member sign-ups from organic traffic from Google Search

9%

Increase YOY in conversion rate from organic traffic from Google Search

Saramin continues to invest in achieving their SEO goals; they look forward to implementing more technologies and features from Google that will help their users understand their content better. Tae Sung is enthusiastic about their work ahead and said, "This is only the beginning of our story."

The mobile usability report in Search Console