Wannabe Bucks
Launching a successful young persons youth job board
Brick Digital
The Project
WannabeBucks is now an authoritative job website in Buckinghamshire that is used by young people aged 14-21 as a resource for not only finding opportunities, but also for learning more about how to improve their employability skills. The site receives over 30 applications per month and has helped connect young people and businesses across Buckinghamshire to fill roles and gain amazing experience.
THE SCOPE
Wannabe Bucks was only an idea when we first started to work with their team. The team at Buckinghamshire County Council and Buckinghamshire Skills Hub were keen to create a youth jobs board that advertised not only part time jobs, but also apprenticeships and work experience in Buckinghamshire. Brick Digital were tasked with envisioning how they could market this new online job board, driving relevant traffic from young people in search of work, and also from businesses who were keen to recruit young people. Following this we were tasked with implementing our plans.
THE APPROACH
The online recruitment industry is a competitive space with some major companies dominating the search results, so we knew that WannabeBucks would need a solid SEO strategy from the beginning, including content creation, site structure planning, and high quality link building. Alongside this, the site needed a keen eye for user experience, to ensure that users could navigate the site in a logical manner that would not put them off, as being a new website with no prior brand exposure it was likely that users would not trust it at first.
TAKING ACTION
Organic SEO – As WannabeBucks is a not-for-profit service they did not have any additional budget for paid advertising, therefore it was key to the success that they had a strong base of organic traffic. After some keyword research it was clear that there were thousands of searches per month for jobs, apprenticeships and work experience in the area. This meant that the site needed a clear structure that allowed Google to discover what each page was about and direct searchers to the site. We implemented the site structure and created targeted landing pages along with excellent content and on-page SEO practices. With the site well prepared to rank in the search results, we got to work implementing a link building plan in order to show Google that WannabeBucks was an authoritative website that provides real value to users. Using blog content and real outreach to hundreds of websites and organisations throughout Buckinghamshire we were able to spread the news of the new website and gain links to the website from these relevant local websites.
Ongoing User Experience Optimisation – Due to the site being a new competitor in a crowded space, we knew it was crucial that the website was not confusing to users and showed a clear path to what each type of user was looking for. This involved an ongoing analysis of the landing pages, user journeys through the site, and conversions which in this case was real applications through the website. This analysis allowed us to identify areas where the website was losing users through a bad experience, which we then optimised with relevant features e.g. more content to explain areas of the site, clearer Calls To Actions (CTAs), or simply changes in the page layout.