Google seeks staff to help with search

Google dominates in search, but rivals are slowly starting to catch up

Search giant Google is looking for help to improve the way its products appear on search sites.

An advert on its careers website is seeking a manager for its search engine optimisation (SEO) team.

Candidates should be able to use technical tricks and techniques to ensure Google's services are prominent in results people get when they search.

The job is aimed at helping Google get its services noticed on rival search engines such as Bing and Duck Duck Go.

Competitive edge

In the advert, Google says the post will involve driving "organic traffic" to improve the standing of web pages featuring its products and services.

Candidates need a background in computer science or "equivalent practical experience".

The ad also specifies that potential candidates should be familiar with the intricacies of the ways websites work and how they can be improved so users find them useful, link to them and recommend them.

Optimising web pages so they appear prominently in search results involves changing the content of pages and their hidden elements to ensure they are correctly indexed by the software companies use to sample and summarise them.

Google declined to talk about the job advert, saying it did not comment on its recruiting processes.

Whoever gets the job will be tasked with helping Google ensure its services are prominently displayed on rivals' sites as well as its own.

Yousaf Sekander, SEO head at digital marketing firm Rocket Mill who spotted the ad, said it showed how Google's priorities were changing.

"Google is keen to aggressively push into the cloud computing market that Amazon is finding success in," he said, as the ad specifically mentions such services in its description.

"Clearly, Google wants to be more visible in the search results both for itself and other popular search engines in this lucrative sector," said Mr Sekander.

Globally, Google still dominates in search - but in some regions, it is facing increasing competition from other companies.

In North America, according to net analysis firm ComScore, Google has a 67% share, followed by Microsoft's Bing at 20% and Yahoo at 13%.

In Europe and China, Google's market share is above 90%.

Some smaller search engines, such as Duck Duck Go, are proving increasingly popular because they collect less data about visitors, or pledge to protect privacy.