Adding apprenticeship vacancies to your website: iFrame, feed or API

You can add apprenticeship vacancies to your website in three ways: embed a job board in an iFrame, display a feed, or build your own pages on an application programming interface (API). Each option trades set-up time against control over design, search visibility and upkeep.

Three options suit different websites

An embedded job board is the quickest option

An inline frame, or iFrame, is a window on your web page that shows a page from another website. Your recruitment system supplies a short piece of code, and your web team pastes it into a page. Search and vacancy pages then run inside the frame, often with the application form, and stay up to date without further work.

The trade-off is control. The frame uses your supplier’s layout, so fonts and spacing may not match your site. Branding is usually limited to the logo and colour settings your supplier offers.

Search engines handle framed content with some uncertainty. Google says its systems generally try to treat a framed page’s content as part of the page that embeds it. It adds that this is not certain, because the framed page is also a normal web page in its own right. Your vacancies may therefore be indexed at the job board’s own address instead of, or as well as, your page.

A supplier can change this. Google supports a pair of robots rules, noindex with indexifembedded, that let a page be indexed only when another page embeds it. The job board’s own pages are then left out of Google’s index, and Google said in 2022 that only it supported indexifembedded. Ask your supplier how its pages are set up.

A feed gives you a simple list in your own design

A feed is a file that lists your live vacancies in a standard format. The RSS 2.0 specification describes RSS as a dialect of XML, in which each item can carry a title, a link, a description and a publication date. Some systems publish XML feeds in their own formats.

Your web team reads the feed and shows the vacancies in your site’s templates. Read it on your server on a schedule and keep a copy, rather than fetching it for every visitor. If the list is in your page’s HTML, search engines can read it as part of that page.

A feed carries a summary, not the whole vacancy. Each item usually links to the full vacancy on your job board, where the applicant applies.

An API lets your web team build vacancy pages on your site

An API lets your website request vacancies from your recruitment system as structured data. Your web team then builds the vacancy list and a page for each vacancy, in your own design and at your own web address. The Apply button links to the application form.

1. Render pages on your server. Google says server-side rendering or pre-rendering makes a site faster for users and crawlers, and that not all bots can run JavaScript.
2. Cache the data. Fetch vacancies on a schedule, store them and serve pages from your store, within your supplier’s rate limits.
3. Take closed vacancies down promptly. Google asks sites to remove an expired job page, set its validThrough date in the past, or remove its job-posting structured data.

The cost is time. Your web team builds the pages and maintains them when your site or the supplier’s API changes. If one vacancy appears at several addresses on your site, Google asks you to mark one as the canonical copy.

A thank-you page event shows which applications your site brings in

Measure the applications each option brings in. A simple method is an analytics event that fires when an applicant reaches the thank-you page.

1. Make sure the application form ends on a thank-you page with its own web address.
2. Fire an event when that page loads, for example through Google Tag Manager.
3. Keep personal data out. Google’s policies forbid passing Google any data it could recognise as personally identifiable information, and web addresses must be free of it too.
4. Add a source to each apply link, so you can compare your website with other channels.
5. Submit a test application and check that the event arrives once.

If the form runs inside an iFrame, so does its thank-you page. A tag on your own page does not run there, so ask your supplier how it reports completed applications.

Accessibility and mobile checks apply to every option

GOV.UK guidance says all UK service providers have a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010. Public sector bodies must also meet the accessibility regulations unless exempt. That means checking their websites against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 and publishing an accessibility statement. Third-party content is exempt only if you did not pay for it or develop it yourself.

1. Give an iFrame a title attribute that describes it. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) says this labels the frame, so users can decide whether to enter it.
2. Check that pages work at a width of 320 CSS pixels without scrolling in two directions. This is WCAG 2.2 success criterion 1.4.10, Reflow, at level AA.
3. Ask whether an embedded frame resizes to fit its content, so visitors do not scroll inside a small box.
4. Complete an application on a phone, and again with a keyboard alone.

Job-posting structured data makes vacancies eligible for Google’s job search

JobPosting structured data is code that describes a vacancy to search engines. Google says it makes job postings eligible for its job search experience, which is available in the United Kingdom.

• The required properties are title, description, datePosted, hiringOrganization and jobLocation. validThrough is required when a posting has an expiry date.
• The markup goes on the page for a single vacancy, never on list pages, and on the same page as the description job seekers read.
• Closed vacancies must be expired or removed. Failing to act may lead to a manual action.
• Google forbids job postings made on behalf of an organisation without its authorisation, so mark up only vacancies you may advertise.
• If an advert does not name the employer, Google describes a confidential value for the hiring organisation’s name.

You control the markup on vacancy pages you build yourself. In an iFrame, it sits in the framed page’s code, so it depends on your supplier.

enrola offers an iFrame and an API

The Website iFrame puts your enrola job board on your own website with copy-and-paste code, and you choose which search fields and Opportunity types it shows, and can try it out before adding it to your website.

The enrola API lists live Opportunities without a token, so your web team can build vacancy pages that read them directly.

After applying, applicants see a thank-you page at its own address, which can send an event to your Google Tag Manager container without any applicant data; the enrola team adds your container for you.

Questions

Will Google index vacancies in an iFrame as part of our page?

Possibly, but not certainly. Google says it generally tries to treat framed content as part of the embedding page, but the framed page is also a page in its own right.

Do our vacancy pages need job-posting structured data?

It is optional. Google says it makes job postings eligible for its job search experience, and it belongs on the page for a single vacancy.

Sources

• Google Search Central: December 2023 SEO office hours, question on iframes.
• Google Search Central: Robots meta tag specifications, last updated 24 March 2026.
• Google Search Central Blog: New robots tag, indexifembedded, 21 January 2022.
• Google Search Central: JavaScript SEO basics, last updated 4 March 2026.
• Google Search Central: Job posting structured data, last updated 8 September 2026.
• Google Analytics Help: Avoid sending personally identifiable information.
• RSS Advisory Board: RSS 2.0 specification.
• GOV.UK: Accessibility requirements for public sector bodies, updated 30 September 2024.
• W3C: Technique H64, the title attribute of the iframe element.
• W3C: Understanding WCAG 2.2 success criterion 1.4.10, Reflow.