As for content, there’s definitely a lot of great employment related content out there, and I think it’s important that you add to this incredible base. For example, I looked up the word ‘Salary’ on inventory.overture.com and found thousands of searches for keyword phrases like teacher salary, pharmacist salary, physician salary, lawyer salary, nurse salary, paralegal salary, etc.

Searches like this add up to a ton of potential traffic for SimplyHired and with the relatively few aggregate searches for these terms (under 10m on Google), it’s not too difficult to optimize pages which will be picked up quickly by the search engines. Obviously ’salary’ is just one example.

At the same time, I like and understand your focus on building great solutions to job search problems…I just want to make sure you don’t miss out on any low hanging fruit.

interesting topic, however i’d beg to differ job search verticals are being ‘laughed at’… on the contrary, job search verticals in general and Simply Hired in particulare have been viewed favorably by a number of folks in the press (WSJ, Wash Post, Economist) & analyst (Charlene Li @ Forrester, Greg Sterlin @ The Kelsey Group) community.

re: your other points about content, partnerships, loyalty… all are on-point topics for discussion, however given the job search vertical is a category that’s only about a year old, and that both Simply Hired and Indeed have experienced tremendous growth in that timeframe, i’d say we’re doing pretty well.

still, i agree there are many questions to answer and many areas to establish customer awareness & traction. that said i think the solution lies in solving a very specific problem, and continuing to build more & more solutions on how to solve that problem even better in the future.

while content is an interesting answer, there is plenty of great employment-related content online. there are certainly SEO benefits to having relevant content, but i’d argue that great search results and helpful job search applications are the best content we can provide to our users.

ultimately, we’ll be successful generating customers & revenue only to the extent we build great solutions to job search problems that aren’t currently being solved very well by others. however, if we are able to deliver on that point we think we have a very bright future.

regards & look forward to reading your next installment,

- dave mcclure
www.SimplyHired.com