What Is Google Search Console & How To Set It Up For My Recruitment Firm?

Google has a plethora of amazing tools for your recruitment website - one of the many reasons why we use a Google stack of tech tools to set up your recruitment website, including Angular, Firebase and Google Cloud. 

In this post we’ll be taking you through what Google Search Console is, why you should be using it and how to set it up for your recruitment agency website. Now don’t worry this isn’t a technical tool at all, there’s maybe a half dozen main parts and they’re all easy to use with limited time invested. 

What Is Google Search Console? 

Google Search Console is a free tool that will help you to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot several website presence issues. 

How Can Google Search Console Help You As A Recruitment Marketer?

The Search Console helps you to understand and improve how Google views your recruitment agency site. One major issue it will help you with is that it has the ability to show which pages on your recruitment website are indexed & listed and crucially which pages are not indexed & listed and why they aren’t listed. You might have brilliant content on your website with low competition, which just isn’t being listed and so isn’t being found by your target audience.

It also runs you through your most popular pages and the keywords that your recruitment agency is most often found for. This can help guide you on content that resonates with your audience and what they’re interested in reading about. 

How To Set Up Google Search Console For Your Recruitment Site 

When you purchase a new website for your recruitment agency we’ll set up Google Search Console for you, along with integrating your website with Google Analytics 4 and LinkedIn Advertising. 

If you’ve purchased your website from a lesser recruitment website developer then we’ll happily talk through how to set this all up. 

This guide from Google will talk you through the whole process.

How To Use The Search Console

This shouldn’t be too overwhelming as there’s only a few key parts we’ll focus on. 

Overview: this gives us a quick… overview of the main parts of Google Search Console. You’ll probably be most interested in the “Performance” & “Indexing” sections. These charts will show you how many clicks your recruitment website has received on a daily basis over the past 3 months and how many pages are currently indexed on Google. 

Performance: the tab is located on the left hand side of the page, underneath ”Overview”. This section covers the site’s overall number of impressions, click throughs and how well each page is performing. Click on “Queries” and then select a specific search term and it will show you your recruitment agency's average position for this keyword, along with click, impressions and the CTR. Click “Pages” and you’ll be presented with your most popular pages and the amount of search engines clicks you've received for these pages. “Countries” shows you where your traffic has come from, geographically. And “Devices” shows you which devices people use while on your website. 

Indexing: the “Pages” tab will show which pages of your recruitment site are listed on Google and crucially which ones are not and why they aren’t. This is so useful when it comes to debugging issues revolving around certain pages or certain types of pages. The “Sitemaps” section will allow you to submit / update your website sitemap so Google can add any pages that may be missing. 

Experience: shows you what’s happening on your pages and what needs to be improved. You’ll need a certain level of traffic before you see anything here. 

How To Manually Ask Google To Index A Page On My Recruitment Agency Site? 

If you’ve noticed that a page isn’t currently being indexed by Google or you’ve just posted a new blog or job post and you don’t want to wait for Google to find it then you can manually ask Google to crawl the page and index it - if it’s able to do so. While in Google Search Console place the URL of the new blog post for example in the search bar at the top of the page where it says “Inspect any URL in ‘domainname’”, then hit Enter. This will take you through to a new page where we’ll click “Test Live URL” - this will show you if it’s possible for Google to index the page on its search engines. This part may take a minute or two. Once complete and as long as Google can index the page then click “Request Indexing”, this part should only take a few seconds. I’d then give it anything up to a few days and the page should be listed on Google. 

How To Add Or Update Your Recruitment Website’s Sitemap On Google Search Console

It may be easier to update the whole of your website in one quick click. Your sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website and should be located at “domainame/sitemap.xml”, for example mine would be "http://abstractionlabs.co.uk/sitemap.xml". You can upload a new version of your sitemap to Google Search Console, which will find any discrepancies to what it has listed and index those extra pages. In Google Search Console, simply navigate to the tab on the left hand side of the page which says “Sitemaps” (located under “Indexing”). Paste your sitemap into where it says “Enter sitemap URL” and click “Submit”. 

And if you need any help with anything else then you can look through the Google Search Console Guide. 

How Often Should I Check The Google Search Console?

I’d recommend putting aside just 15 minutes each month on a set date to check in on the search results. Check your traffic levels and how they compare to recent weeks, hopefully you'll see that your search ranking is slowly improving, that any new pages (such as blog & job posts) that have been added over the past 4 weeks are actually indexed by and listed on Google, manually add any pages that aren’t currently listed, make sure there aren’t any major issues in the notification panel and have a look at what type of content is performing well and which search terms users find your site for. 

Issues

If there are any issues with your recruitment agency website then don’t worry Google will now email you - along with showing you notifications in the panel. So for example if Google suspects your site has been hacked, spots any unusual events or has trouble listing any of your pages then Google will get in touch to let you know.