Do you have a recruitment agency website or staffing agency website that needs SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to generate more clients, candidates or even create better brands in your sector, specialism or area?

The fact is that with proper content marketing and blogs for SEO, you will be able to generate more visitors, more job orders, meet more clients, more CVs and resumes, have more recruiters join you and at the same time get a better-perceived brand experience with more kudos from your ideal prospects. Nice hey?

Having been doing SEO for almost 20 years now, and had websites perform well and rank no 1 in desirable search terms for hundreds of targeted and desirable search terms, follow these five simple hacks to generate the right traffic for your website.

1. SEO Friendly Websites for Recruitment Agencies 

Recruitment website design needs ongoing investment and consistent management. That’s why SaaS recruitment website design is so popular. Even if you rank on page one for a search term you want to rank for today, tomorrow might be a different story. You need to keep updating your website and updating website pages, so your website appears fresh and relevant to users. Submit it to Google using the Search Console as well as your site map. You need to follow white hat SEO techniques and keep an eye out for major Google Algorithm updates (there are three or more updates every single day to Google algorithms). 

Use tools such as www.ubersuggest.com, www.moz.com or  www.semrush.com to learn where your site is ranking and for which search terms. Keep learning SEO tips and writing blogs for SEO. You’ll soon be setting the standards for all your competitors, who’ll be benchmarking themselves against you. Keep up with best practice, and you can even use your prowess in pitches to win new business. 

Search volumes change every month, so you need to think about when you’ll be publishing your content and update your site regularly. 

2. SEO Web Design – Focus Where You Can Win 

Are you looking to get more clients? More of a specific type of candidate? Need recruiters to join your staffing agency? Don’t try and focus on goals that are too broad. In SEO, you need to be specific. It could be called “Specific Engine Optimisation” not “Search Engine Optimisation.” Break your content down into topics and sub-topics, and create a page that is optimised for one search term. Then link to that page consistently with your “anchor text” (Text displayed to users on the link) being matched precisely to the search term you’re trying to rank for. 

Create categories that mirror your business revenue and growth areas going forward. Group your keywords into these topics and sub-topics and use them consistently over time across your whole team. The more keywords you want to target, the more work you need to do your SEO on, which means more resources, time and money. So if you are unsure, do not choose ALL the categories, just those where you have enough resources and time to achieve a good page ranking and to maintain your page ranking. Start off with ten target search terms you want to rank for that are evergreen and mission-critical for your business. Optimise your website properly for those search terms, see results, then expand from there.

3. Be Consistent – Optimise Your Website Pages

Are you a recruitment agency, employment agency, staffing agency, executive search agency, headhunter, or a headhunter agency? Think what you identify as and be consistent with how you describe yourself. Use that in your navigation, website pages and metadata. 

Once you’ve chosen which search term best matches your ideal user’s intent – be consistent and match to that search term on Google. Good doesn’t necessarily mean big. Expensive doesn’t mean it’s right for your business. If you look at these search terms here, you can see the monthly search volumes on Google, the price of a click if you were advertising on that term (CPC – Cost per Click) and how competitive that search term is you’re trying to rank for. 

Keyword	Volume	Search CPC	Competition
headhunter	368,000	£0.56	13%
staffing agency	135,000	£4.20	22%
recruitment agency	90,500	£1.80	36%
employment agency	90,500	£3.40	29%
headhunter agency	1,300	£3.20	37%
executive search agency	390	£5.70	28%

Using the example above, which would you want to rank for? That search term with the most search volume? The highest value traffic or the lowest competition levels? The answer lies in where you think you can win and the traffic you generate that will be most relevant to your business and is likely to convert to use your services. There’s no right or wrong answer. . .

Once you then go down a level and get more specific, you might then add in the sector you’re hiring in. For example, if you’re a marketing specialist recruitment agency, you can see the search volumes are a lot lower and the click price a lot higher. 

marketing recruitment agency	2900	£4.60	50%
marketing staffing agency	390	£11.00	45%
marketing headhunter	390	£3.90	61%

Always think about the intent of the users, not the click, and design your page to help your new visitors convert and find what they’re looking for. The click price (even though you’re not paying for the organic/free traffic your web page is generating) is very different. This gives you an idea of how much people are willing to pay to advertise on those search terms.

4. Ranking #1 Means Nothing – Conversion is everything

Many SEO agencies or experts boast that being TOP 3 is the key for SEO, but here is the problem. Ranking in the TOP 3 doesn’t make your potential customer click on your website. You have to take into consideration these other recruitment website design elements when tackling SEO in a recruitment agency

People Clicking on Your URL is not Enough:

● Does your website page load fast enough?

● Does it give them the information they were looking for?

● Does it tell users what to do next?

● Do they trust you after visiting your website?

● Would you be willing to call you or leave your contact number after reading your page?

● Will you respond to your enquiries, calls or email? And how quickly?

● Is your offer or proposition compelling enough?

● Does your offer have a deadline?

● What incentive do they have to register with you or confirm their interest? 

● Will the customer refer more customers or candidates to you?

The entire process of getting ranked and the final process of getting potential customers to call you or email you is very different. The “in-between” process is so important that many people fail to understand or pay full attention to it. This is called conversion and every page on your website should have continuation or conversion in mind.

5. Leave SEO To the Experts. Seriously

The SEO experts will always tell you to go for quality backlinks, they may be good but remember it is all about natural links…when your website has lots of natural links from high-quality domains, your website will improve in ranking gradually over time and maintain its position. This is the best method to rank up high and steadily.

Other methods of creating good traffic and creating real visitors can be in terms of putting your URL in name cards, flyers, banners, sending messages to WhatsApp, SMS where there is a URL of your website, and other non “traditional” backlinking.

When non-traditional visitors come to your website, it is telling Google that you have REAL visitors and not just another “link” created visitor. Your website will be heavily awarded more points.

When doing SEO yourself, you will need to do the project management, research, implementation and monitoring yourself or delegate all the other major routine work to different groups of people.

For example, the backlinking and your landing page promotion should be constantly done by different people RANDOMLY, so it creates natural SEO activities, and it makes it look legitimate.

Bear in mind that when you do your own SEO on your own recruitment website without OUTSOURCING to other people, it doesn’t usually really work too well.

Doing SEO in Recruitment 

Understanding Google loves to make the users happy is critical. So, if your content is not great and YOU are the only person promoting it, you will NEVER get to rank #1. A recommendation is to ask your recruitment consultants to do the backlinking from their home computer, not the office computer. This helps, but Google knows your tricks. Everything is being tracked, so do not waste your time doing yourself.

Can you measure pages per visit? Time on site? Returning visitors? Do you know which pages your traffic is being generated by? Which search terms you should rank for? Do you know for which search terms you’re currently ranking for and which pages are ranking for those terms? Knowing these basics is fundamental to your success and entirely possible.

If you want to find out more and how to get your recruitment website performing on search engines, give John JB Russell at Staffing Future, our recruitment website designer partner a call on 020-7019-9078