Google is notifying site owners via Search Console of an increase in searches related to work from home jobs.
The increase in searches is directly related COVID-19’s impact on businesses and employment.
The purpose of alerting site owners is to make them aware of an opportunity to use remote job structured data markup.
Lily Ray shared a screenshot of the email Google is sending out, which reads:
“Given the recent COVID-19 impact on businesses and employment, Google has seen increased job seeker interest in work-from-home and remote job opportunities. We want to make it easier for job seekers to discover these relevant employment options.
In response to this, we encourage you to annotate all remote jobs by specifying jobLocationType:”TELECOMMUTE” in any job postings that allow for 100% remote work.
Implementing this markup can expose a “Work from home” tag next to that job posting, to improve visibility for interested job seekers.
Please note that this feature is available only in the USA and UK at the moment.”
It does not come as a surprise that there’s an increase in searches related to work from home jobs.
With widespread layoffs and business closures many people have been pushed toward finding work online.
It is a bit surprising, however, to see Google send out an alert about it.
I’m always welcome to being corrected, but I can’t remember a time in the recent past when Google has done that.
So I decided to investigate and find out how significant the increase has been.
Here’s what I found.
Increase in ‘Work From Home’ Searches
According to Google Trends, the spike in searches for “work from home” started in the second week of March And peaked in the third week.
Search interest jumped from 26 all the way to 100.
As you can see, the increase was short lived as search interest began to fall every following week.
By the third week of April, search interest was already back down to 39 which is roughly where it has stayed since.
It’s interesting that Google waited until now to send an alert about the rise in “work from home” searches.
Although, on second glance, there’s evidence that search interest is on the way up again.
Search interest is currently sitting at 48, which is the highest it has been since the first week of April.
Looking at the past 5 years of data, search interest is definitely up overall.
For the past several years search interest stayed consistently between the 20-30 range. It never even came close to hitting 40 until the abrupt increase when the pandemic hit.
Let’s jump ahead now to the past 30 days of data and take a look at where search interest is highest.
Search interest in “work from home” is currently highest in states where COVID-19 is rapidly spreading.
Mississippi, where search interest is strongest, just made the news for having the highest positivity rate of COVID-19 tests in the whole country.
This data seems to indicate that residents in COVID-19 hotspots are increasingly looking for ways to stay safe and earn a living without leaving the home.
Back to Google’s original point – if you have any listings for remote jobs then using the appropriate structured data markup can help them get found.
For more on how to do that, see my article here.
Source: Lily Ray on Twitter
