SEO Strategies for Recruitment Websites: Bringing Clients To Your Business

Currently the market is flooded with candidates and recruitment agencies are fighting to keep existing clients and land new firms to recruit for. The market is hyper competitive and you need ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors. You’re more than likely pushing your consultants to bring in more vacancies, enlisting the help of outside recruitment trainers, paying monthly subscriptions for learning & development platforms to upskill your more junior consultants in business development and pushing your marketing team to focus on keeping your current clients engaged with attracting new businesses to partner with. 

But what are you missing? What about your website? Can you use your recruitment website to bring in new clients? Of course you can but let’s first focus on SEO optimising your website and building from there. The more SEO optimised your recruitment website is, the more chance you have of ranking higher and the more chance you have of being found by new clients. 

Keyword Research

All great SEO campaigns begin with keyword research. You’re going to need to sit down and work out why clients might be searching for a recruitment partner, how they’ll be searching and which search terms they’ll be using. I used to work in-house, recruiting for content marketing agencies, advertising agencies and a major media owner. There’s going to be a limited selection of reasons why a talent acquisition manager or hiring manager will be searching for your services and these include…

1) The current PSL isn’t performing to the level the internal talent team expects.

2) The talent team is looking to replace one larger recruitment partner with a few smaller agencies or vice versa. 

3) A new talent acquisition manager has joined the firm and would like to put their stamp on the company. 

4) The company is looking for new talent, which the current PSL cannot provide. 

5) The company is looking to ramp up hiring and would like to add to the PSL to ensure capacity meets demand. 

6) A hiring manager isn’t happy with the CVs they are being provided with and decides to go rogue and enlist the services of a recruitment agency to fill the role. 

If they’re a retailer then the search terms they’re likely to use would be, “recruitment firms for retailers”, “retail recruitment agencies in Manchester”, “Manchester based recruitment firms specialising in retail”, “merchandise buyer recruitment businesses” or a general mix of those keywords. It’s going to be a long list of various variations but it’s well worth doing. 

Monitor & Measure 

How are you going to see if any of this actually works without having access to your website traffic data. Make sure your recruitment website is integrated with Google Analytics 4 so you can track the levels of traffic you receive before the implementation and check back on a regular basis to see what is working. Focus on what’s popular and fix anything that isn’t working. 

Optimise Your Content

Now we have our long list of keywords we’ll want to work through our website copy and also previous blog posts and see if, how and where we can incorporate these keywords into our content. This should make our pages more relevant to those search terms. Any edited pages will need to be resubmitted manually via the Google Search Console. Google will automatically crawl your site but it could take weeks or months for it to find this edited content so best to submit it yourself. 

Create New Content

You are likely also to want to switch your blog post strategy over the next few months and focus more on content for clients, creating resources for hiring managers, talent acquisition teams and HR teams. If you have the capacity and ability to then build out beyond written blog posts and also look at creating video content for your social channels such as TikTok and YouTube. Once again, any new content you create, make sure you add the new URL manually to the Google Search Console. And remember to post regularly.

Update Frequently 

Make sure you update your website on a regular basis. Even if you’re running a very small recruitment agency you should be able to update your website with new content on a daily basis, just by adding the new roles that come in. 

Images

You can optimise your images by editing the alt tags attached to each image. See if you can update them using any of the client focused keywords you came up with earlier. And once again any images that are updated you will need to resubmit these pages to Google Search Console so they’re picked and indexed with the new content as soon as possible. 

Technical SEO

This is typically looked after by your web developer, internal SEO consultant, specialised marketing team or outside marketing agency. You can check the technical SEO score for your website by using the Google Lighthouse report. This will show you any issues you may need and want to fix. You should have an SEO score of at least 90/100. 

On-page SEO

Look through each page, checking the page source to see page titles, meta tags such as description & keywords and make changes by incorporating the keywords you discovered earlier. Also look at your internal links - are you making sure you cross reference relevant pages on your site (much like we've done on this page). This will help Google understand your website better, find new content easier and also mean a better user experience for clients, keeping them engaged longer with content they’re interested in. 

Off-page SEO

This includes anything that will improve your search ranking but isn’t directly on your website so would include the likes of link building and social media posts. Maintain a good consistency and level of quality to your social media posts and try to push content clients will engage with. Also use that content to push clients to your website - your website is a great tool for selling your services and has all of your contact details. Look into link building too - what will your client be reading? Probably industry news websites. It’s well worth reaching out to the top 10 B2B industry news websites and see if they might be looking for news about the current market when it comes to hiring or average salaries. They’ll normally offer you a backlink to your website - these are worth more than gold!

Website Pages

I’m sure they are but it’s worthwhile checking that all your pages are indexed on Google, especially any pages and blog posts you’re using to attract new clients. If they’re not currently listed then you can add them manually yourself via Google Search Console. 

Just Do A Little Bit More

I was reading an SEO blog a little while ago and saw a brilliant quote. The writer was talking about the best piece of advice he had received from an old manager and it was “just do a little more than your competitor”. If your competitor is putting out content on their blog once a week then you post content twice a week. If they have a domain authority of 20/100 then you just need to get 21/100 to outrank them. If they have a Google Lighthouse score of 320/400 then you just need 321/400. If they have 50 unique backlinking domains then you need 51 to outrank. Just do one more than your competitors and you’ll be on the top spot! 

If you’re looking for any more SEO advice for your recruitment agency website then please get in touch.