How Can I Quickly & Easily Improve My Recruitment Website Without Any Technical Knowledge? PART 1

This blog post ties in with the Mike Ames Show on "Quick Website Changes That Increase Sales", which you can view here.

First of all if you don’t have a website for your recruitment agency then get one! 

Now assuming you have a recruitment website - I’m going to make this as broad as possible and assume for the most part you have very little technical knowledge. Also I’ll assume you’re in one of three situations…

1) You have a no code or low code website such as a template website on Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, etc. 

2) You have a WordPress website and you have access to the content management system. 

3) You have a website built with a frontend framework / library such as Angular, React or Vue and you have access to an in-built content management system and/or have access to your developer. 

This blog post’s aim is to improve your website so it becomes faster, gives your clients & candidates a better experience, improves accessibility, increases its search ranking, makes your agency site more easily findable and ensures it’s secure and legally compliant. All of these combined will work towards improved revenue figures directly contributable to your website. 

We've broken it down into two parts because there was so much to cover - enjoy!

HTTP Versus HTTPS

This is a pretty basic one but when purchasing your domain make sure you purchase an SSL certificate as well. This adds an extra layer of security and encryption when transmitting data from the user's browser to your server, for example when a candidate sends their CV via a contact form on your website. Your website will be more secure, candidates & clients will be happy to use it, they’ll be more open to sending sensitive information to you and the search engines will rank your website higher. 

To test if your website has an SSL certificate simply open up a browser and navigate to your website. Just beside your website URL you’ll either see an icon with two circles and two lines or it will say “Not secure”. Click on the circles and lines icon and it should say “Your connection is secure”. 

Mobile Responsiveness

Is your website fully mobile responsive? How do you know and how do you check? Well we can check how your recruitment website looks on 20 different mobile & tablet devices using the Google Developer Tools. Simply navigate to your website, right click on the page, select “Inspect”, then in the top left corner of the newly opened panel (the Google Developer Tools) you should see an icon depicting a mobile phone in front of a laptop - this should be a shade of blue - if it isn’t then click it. Then on the left hand side panel, just above the view of your website you should see a tab - “Dimensions:...” - click this to select different mobile & tablet devices to see how your website looks.

Google Lighthouse

I love Google Lighthouse. It gives us an easily accessible and brilliant overview of the current health of our website with actionable insights we can use to improve it. It will gauge your website based on four factors, its performance, accessibility, SEO and general best practices and give you a score out of 100 for each, for a total score out of 400. For context you should be aiming for ideally 330/400 but I see most recruitment websites sit around 270-320/400 - my website scores 380/400 but I’m good at what I do. 

To access Google Lighthouse simply open up an Incognito browser (you can use a standard Google Chrome browser too but the score will be more reflective of the actual score in Incognito). Navigate to your website and right click in the window. Select Inspect. Then in the Google Developer Panel that opens up on the right hand side of the screen, click on the “>>” icon and select “Lighthouse” then click “Analyze page load”.

It will also give you pointers on how to improve your website.

Pages

The more pages you have on your recruitment site and the more quality content you have, the more chance you have of keeping visiting clients & candidates engaged, which subsequently increases your chance of converting them into a sale. Have a look at the websites of your top 20 competitors and see the pages they’re carrying on their recruitment websites. 

There's loads of pages you should consider for your recruitment site. As a minimum I’d suggest you should carry the following pages as guide, About, Blogs, Case Studies, Candidates, Clients, Contact Us, Home, Internal Careers, Jobs, Pricing Models, Markets / Sectors / Specialisms, Team, Testimonials, Privacy Policy. 

For larger agencies I’d suggest including pages & sections for Awards, Candidate Registration / Candidate Portal, Cookies, DEI, Events, Office Locations, Podcasts, Press Room, RPO / Embedded Talent, Social Responsibility, Terms of Use, etc. 

Contact Us Page

We’ve written a piece about the perfect contact us page so we won’t go into too much detail here but be sure to include the company address, telephone number (always list a landline number over a mobile number), general email address, a Google Maps insert of your office location, any social media links and a contact form with full form validation and attachment functionality.

Content 

Invest in high quality content! There are so many brilliant recruitment content writers out there. It will pay dividends over the long term. People can spot Chat-GPT generated content from a mile off and they’ve got no interest in reading it. And all the major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo currently have the ability to sniff out AI generated content and they do penalise websites that use it. High quality, insightful and unique content will keep clients & candidates engaged for longer and will result in more traffic for your website and more revenue for your agency. And make sure you post blogs on a regular basis.

SEO Optimising Content

The Google Keyword Planner (https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/tools/keyword-planner/) is a great tool for finding similar search terms and the corresponding number of monthly searches for each keyword.

There’s an absolute tonne of stuff you can do here but we’ll focus on two key areas for now. Click “Discover new keywords” and you can either enter in a keyword phrase that users may use to find your website such as “pharmaceutical recruitment firm in Manchester” or you can paste the URL of your website into “Start with a website” and it will suggest keywords based on the content of your website. 

You can then take this list of keywords and integrate them into the copy of a specific page on your recruitment site or into a blog post you’re writing. Look for a mix of head terms (broad, general terms) and long-tail keywords (more specific, longer phrases) that your target audience is searching for. 

Type these keyword phrases into Google and look at the top-ranking pages. Understand the type of content that ranks well and how your competitors are using these keywords in their content.

Blogs

If you have a blog page then try to update it with new content at least once a week. There’s so many benefits to this and it will gradually pay off over time. Updating your blog on a regular basis shows search engines that your website is still in use, is active and is pushing out new content - new content which may be useful for internet patrons. The search engines love websites that are regularly updated! Also the more useful the content is that you put out there via your blog, the more chance you have of winning new clients and candidates who may find you via a blog article. Maybe a talent acquisition manager is searching for content on the current state of the C# developer market as he needs to put together a presentation on current salary & employment levels, maybe they find a blog post you wrote about this very subject. 

And now a little story to prove my point. When I ran my old recruitment agency I wrote a blog post on “What is media & advertising sales?” (the area I recruited into) and it was actually the Google definition for that search term and drove so much graduate traffic to our website. I recently wrote a piece for Abstraction Labs comparing Chat-GPT4 with Gemini Advanced when Gemini Advanced was first released and that post is currently sitting in 10th place for a range of search terms around that. That’s a huge topic, which I’m sure has an absolute tonne of content around but we managed to get a high spot for a well written article that was released before most websites got a piece together about it.

Call To Actions (CTAs)

You need to take visitors on a journey through your website to an end goal but first have a think about the types of visitors you’ll expect. We’ll keep this example simple and say you have 3 types of visitors, candidates looking for a new job, clients looking for a recruitment agency for a live vacancy and lastly recruitment consultants looking to work for your recruitment agency. 

So for example a potential client may land on your home page, you’ll probably want to direct them to your Clients page, which lists the services you offer and which sectors and roles you recruit for, then at the bottom of that page you may want to direct them to the Testimonials page, where they can see comments from current & previous clients & candidates talking about how great you are, then finally you may want to show them a call to action to your Contact page so they can send you an email or give you a call. 

Ensure each page has a call to action so the visitor never feels lost and attempts to navigate away from your website.

Images

There’s an absolute tonne we could do with our images so let’s not waste any time. 

First of all we have various different formats when it comes to image use. We typically see images with a PNG or a JPEG suffix and the majority of images we have on our devices will be one of these. However these image formats were created decades ago and although they’re brilliant for a lot of situations, they’re not ideal for modern websites. Enter Google…. Google created the WebP format some years ago, with the objective of creating a format which produced a high quality image but at a smaller size, meaning faster loading websites! So all you need to do is upload your PNG and jpg images to an image converter such as https://cloudconvert.com/webp-converter and change them to a WebP format and upload them to your website. 

Secondly we move onto image sizes. You’ll ideally want to use different sized images for different parts of your website and different sized images to be shown on different screen sizes. This helps to ensure the highest quality image is delivered to your user but also ensures speed. For example you don’t want to deliver a huge, high resolution image delivered to a mobile visitor as it will drain their data allowance and will slow down the website and likewise you don’t want to show a small, low resolution image to a user visiting your recruitment site from a large desktop screen. You should have one set of images to be served on mobile devices and one set of images to be served on desktops. You can edit the size of your images with any standard photo imaging software such as Photos on Windows.

For images that are part of the general content of the page, such as blog post images, a width of around 1200px to 1600px is usually sufficient for most designs, ensuring good quality on standard and high-resolution screens.

For full-width background images & hero images, consider using images that are at least 1920px wide. This width covers most desktop resolutions comfortably. For very high-resolution screens, you might go up to 2560px, but remember that larger images can significantly affect load times.

For images within content on mobile devices, a width of 600px to 800px is typically enough. Mobile devices usually have a lower screen resolution than desktops, and the images are scaled down, so going beyond this range might not provide noticeable quality improvements but could impact loading times.

For background and hero images on mobile, you can use images around 1080px wide. This size works well for high-resolution mobile screens while keeping file sizes more manageable for mobile data connections.

Leading on from our previous point but a separate point - make sure you use high quality images. Your website can look unprofessional very easily through the use of low resolution images. 

My fourth point will revolve around something a little more technical but you should have access to something called an alt tag, alt text or alt attribute. This is basically text that describes the image and is used by search engine crawlers and also screen readers to work out what the image depicts. Use keywords that are relevant to your business to describe images. If you want to see your image alt tags, simply navigate to a page on your website which has an image, right click and select “View page source”, then CTRL + F to bring up the search bar and type in “<img” and then will show you all the lines of code that refer to the images on your page, alongside this should be your alt tag e.g. “alt=”two colleagues working together””. 

And my final & final point on this enormous subject is please try to use real images of you, your team and your offices and spend time sourcing images. Clients, candidates and potential employees will buy into your company so much more!

Sitemap

Your sitemap is the list of all your pages on your websites, all of your main pages and all of your blog and job pages. All of these should be listed in your sitemap xml file. Search engines will use this file to index your website and decide which pages should be listed on Google for example. You can access your sitemap by entering sitemap.xml at the end of your domain URL so my sitemap is located at “abstractionlabs.co.uk/sitemap.xml”. Check your sitemap has a full list of all of your website pages and automatically updates it as you add pages. Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy should all do this automatically. WordPress will require an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO to ensure this is completed.

Are All Your Pages On Google?

Recruitment agency owners and recruitment marketers just tend to assume that all of their pages are listed on the search engines but how do you know? Have you ever or do you regularly check? You can check which of your website pages are currently listed on Google by typing the following into Google, “site:domainname” so if I were to check mine I would type “site:abstractionlabs.co.uk”. This will give you a full list of all the pages that are currently indexed on Google. I would recommend cross referencing this list against all of the pages on your recruitment agency website. 

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

GA4 is the latest generation of Google's web analytics platform, designed to provide a more comprehensive understanding of user behaviour across websites and apps. GA4 can generate reports showing you how often each of your pages was visited, which countries your users reside in, where your traffic has come from and so much more. 

To navigate to your GA4 account simply visit https://analytics.google.com/ to see if it’s already set up. If it isn’t then there are plenty of online tutorials that can talk you through how to set it up and then integrate it with your no code or low code website, WordPress website or Angular site.

Google Tag Manager (GTM)

Google Tag Manager is a separate tool to GA4 but also provided by Google that simplifies the process of adding and managing various tags and tracking codes on your website. GTM allows you to deploy and update tracking scripts without modifying your recruitment website's code directly. 

It has many uses but one of its main uses is for event tracking. You can easily set up tracking for button or link clicks, form submissions, page views, and other interactions without writing any custom code.

You can navigate to https://tagmanager.google.com/ to see if you have already set it up. A few lines of code will also need to be added to your website. It’s also easily achievable no matter if you have a Wix, Squarespace or WordPress website - there’s plenty of tutorials online.

This should give you enough to get started on improving & optimising your recruitment website to increase traffic and conversions. We'll be releasing Part 2 in a few weeks' time and if you have any questions then please get in touch with me!