glassdoor
career pages optimization
summary
Glassdoor’s Career Pages are a hub to learn about insights into a particular career’s work, salaries, interview questions, and seniority levels. I worked to improve SEO and increase traffic through a series of rich text integrations and optimizations.
role
Product Design Intern on Site Discovery
team
Project Manager, Software Engineers, Traffic/ Machine Learning Engineers
timeline
Jun 2021- Aug 2021
results
Shipped redesigns of two career pages.
Identified areas of opportunity aligned with research that expanded scope of original product brief.
Collaborated with the ML team to ensure content viability for all career types.
Prepared design spec documentation for software engineers.
background
Having launched Career Pages as an MVP in 2020, Glassdoor recognized that it was time to increase content while traffic was slow to ramp up. I asked,
“How might we increase traffic to glassdoor’s career pages while driving user and sEO value?”
opportunityLow traffic to and engagement on Career Overview and Path pages
StrategyAdd rich text and meaningful content (eg. FAQ’s, education and skill requirements)
ObjectiveIncrease unique users to Career pages and # of indexed Career pages
Core Experiences
career overview page
career overview deep dive
Summary overview panel: A new set of icons to the right that describe a career in terms of its education requirements, salary range, average years of experience, as well as ratings for work life balance and career opportunity. These key metrics serve as a quick at a glance summary for users to compare careers as they do their research.
Career Path module: Consolidates seniority levels with a graph showing years of experience to link the current level together.
FAQ’s module: Answers to frequently asked questions about a career. These questions are also rich text that help improve this page’s SEO and rank better in search results.
Career guides: Blog post information about careers written by the Glassdoor team. This was moved from the Career Path page to the Overview page because it would be a more helpful resource on this page as users are likely exploring careers.
Related Careers: Introduces the idea of similar occupations within larger industry with data about shared skills and salaries.
Jobs: Job listings on Glassdoor that pertain to this career and are important to Glassdoor’s core business model. This was moved from the body to the right rail because it less relevant in this stage of user journey when users are most likely still discovering and researching potential careers.
Core Experiences
career path page
Career path deep dive
Table of Contents: Every career on Glassdoor has five step-structure in its career path for programmatic simplicity. The table of contents improves SEO rankings and appears in search results as rich data.
Education and Skill Information: This step informs users what education level, background, and skills a career tends to require based on Glassdoor’s aggregated user and job listing data.
Industry Specific Steps: For editorially written content, “industry specific” tags highlight what steps are unique to this occupation.
Seniority Levels: Show the promotion path of the career, with information about salary, years of experience and jobs. Icons correspond to the ones on the Career Overview page. This was moved to the right rail to focus on body content.
the process
research
To gain a deeper understanding of SEO, I conducted extensive research by reading articles and studying best practices for SEO design. Here's a summary of what I learned:
SEO Terminology: Important SEO terms such as "rich text," "structured data," "bounce rate," "dwell time," "organic CTR," "mobile-first indexing," "Googlebot," and "featured snippets."
Effective SEO Strategies: What constitutes effective SEO practices and how we assess its performance.
Leveraging UX Design for SEO: Integration of User Experience design principles into SEO strategies to enhance website performance.
Traffic Metrics: During the early summer period, our "Career Overview" and "Path" pages demonstrated lower performance compared to our other "Occupation" pages. This underscores the urgency of implementing measures to boost their traffic promptly.
The Career Path page had a bounce rate of 63.94% and was only 0.03% of all Occupation page visits.
The Career Overview page had a bounce rate of 57.2% and was only 0.08% of all Occupation page visits.
2. brainstorming, designing, and iterating
Throughout the process, I filled an entire notebook full of ideas, notes, feedback from stakeholders, design considerations from engineers, suggestions from my manager, reminders from my PM, and sketches. It took many weeks of designing, presenting, gathering feedback, iterating, and repeating the process.
Expanding the Project Brief: Originally, the project brief focused on integrating rich text for a skills and education module. In the initial iterations, we experimented with various ways to present this information visually. However, as I delved further into the product space, I identified an opportunity to prioritize another rich text integration project from our team's backlog for this quarter. I proposed merging it with the skills and education data.
The idea is to incorporate the skills and education information within a broader "how to become" career guide. This approach prevents users from encountering redundant information and creates a cohesive and logically structured experience on a single page.
Page Layout and Hierarchy Studies
In Figma, trying out different ideas, moving things around, and iterating. Initial brainstorming below.
Iterations: Examples of designs that did not make the cut due to complexity, taking up too much real estate, bad design, and/ or scalability issues.
Before and After: Career Overview
Before and After: Career Path
Designing for different states: In addition to designing for the ideal desktop experience, I also designed for the mobile web experience, as well as edge cases such as low data, no data, and data limitations with editorial vs programmatic content.
Regular Data
Low Data
No Data
Programmatic
Responsive Design: I prepared detailed spec sheets for the engineers on my team to communicate how each modal should shrink to different screen sizes.
3. impact
these improvements shipped!
Why does this matter? This 2021 Washington Post article writes about evolving trends in people’s attitudes towards careers and career changes. People were beginning to fundamentally reimagining their relationships with their jobs.
This presented an opportunity for Glassdoor to help people everywhere learn and discover careers they’ll love. Whether it’s a somebody changing careers at this time, or students looking for potential career interests, the Career pages have a lot of potential to be of value to a growing segment of users. Knowing my work would be helping people navigate this time made it extra rewarding.
final thoughts
The Career Overview and Path pages were a first foray into the world of SEO for me, and I am so grateful to have been able to learn so much about it. From research to designing and everything in between, I learned so much about designing within an existing product and design system, as well as how to balance different business, user, and technical needs. Most importantly, I learned to work with a PM and multiple stakeholders throughout the entire process. Thank you to everyone at Glassdoor for their continuous support and mentorship throughout this project—summer 2021 was a blast!
