Why Posting Regular Content On Your Recruitment Agency Website Is So Important

I spend a lot of my time looking through recruitment agency websites, either to pitch them because their website is terrible or looking for inspiration. I’ll always have a look at the blog pages of the website, firstly to see what they’re writing about but also to look at the frequency of their blog posts. Their blog post history typically starts off well, fresh new content and ideas being posted on a regular basis and then you start to see the motivation & inspiration drop off with blog posts going from being posted once a week to then once every few weeks, then once a month and then you see the last post that was written two years ago. It’s a little sad and depressing to be honest. And it's probably because you didn't see or measure the results of it and so deemed it to be a failure or prioritized other tasks ahead of it.

Now I’m under no illusion and let’s not kid ourselves, your candidates and clients are not checking your blog on a weekly basis looking for that new blog you just posted. That’s just not going to happen. I wake up every morning and check BBC News but I doubt you have the same number of reporters, journalists, editors and writers that the BBC has. 

However regular content from your blog, resources and insights pages will help you to keep in touch with your target market. Also Google (and the other search engines) love websites that are regularly updated. And that includes recruitment agency websites! 

Google knows your website is a recruitment website and it knows all about recruitment websites, why people visit them and their most popular pages. Your most popular pages are probably going to be your homepage, jobs page and then contact page but you want to show Google that your website is of a high enough standard that users visit other parts of your website (such as your blog, resources and insights pages) because you provide your candidates & clients with high quality content. Google loves websites that produce high quality content! 

Try to work out what you can commit to over the long term. I want you to sit down and determine how much time you’re happy to dedicate to writing each week / month or how much money you’re happy to spend on someone writing blog content for you per month. And this is the amount of time even when you’re really busy or the amount of money you’re happy to spend on this even during the lean times.

Ideally you should be aiming for once a week. This is relatively easy to stick to - it’s basically an hour each week or if you’re outsourcing the work you can find a brilliant recruitment copywriter for around £50-£150 per post. Don’t look at it as a cost, more as an investment in your recruitment website’s search ranking. Regularly writing content will increase your search ranking over time, will lead to backlinks and both of these will bring in fresh new clients and candidates to the agency. 

The more regularly you post, then the more chance your website will be mentioning keywords that are relevant to your industry and the more of a diverse range of keywords your website will contain. For example my website tends to simply mention recruitment agency websites across most of the standard pages but when you include my blog then I’m mentioning keywords that are not directly related but still highly relevant such as “Google for Jobs”, “recruitment website integrations”, “domain authority”, “how to purchase a domain”, “how to start a recruitment agency” and so on.  

Your blog pages will also help to build your recruitment agency’s brand over time, it will build its voice, its values, show what you believe in, your success stories, show your authority in the market and gradually build over time as a brilliant tool that sells your business in a soft, consultative manner. 

If your a recruitment agency marketer or a recruitment agency owner, then give your consultants something to post to their LinkedIn profiles. As a recruitment consultant it can be easy to get caught up searching for candidates on LinkedIn and maintaining relationships with your current client base. I see tonnes of recruiters who just post their live vacancies to LinkedIn and nothing more. Help them out and give them some real content to put out there and build their personal brand.

If you are struggling for content one week don’t be tempted to repeat content! Google and other search engines can see when you’ve copied and pasted content and it will penalise you for that. It’s just a waste of your time in the short to medium term - if you’re already ranking in the top few spots with one particular blog post then Google is unlikely to post the other piece on the first page too. Google looks for quality but it also looks for a diversity of websites for the first few pages.  

One misconception I do want to clear up is that just because you’re posting fresh new content every week, it doesn’t mean Google is going to rank your content at the top of search engine results. Google is not placing the newest pages at the top of the searcher’s page. It’s placing the highest quality and most closely aligned answers to that search term (or what Google thinks the person is searching for). I often see pages at the top of the results page that were created years ago. On a side note if you want to beat those results then simply produce a piece of skyscraper content to compete with them. Skyscraper content is when you take the best pieces from the top few results (don't copy & paste!) and combine that with your own experience. 

Quality content is so important but it’s not guaranteed to get your recruitment agency’s website on the first page. Google prioritises links to your site from a diverse set of sources (ideally from high authority websites and or sites within your niche) and time spent on the website relative to your competition. When Google sees lots of websites linking to your blog post then Google thinks, this must be a good source if all of these humans are referencing it. And time on site matters as Google views this as a barometer of your particular page answering that person’s search query. If they leave within a few seconds then your page probably didn’t answer their questions but if they spend 30+ seconds on there then it likely did. 

If you’re wondering how we can improve your blog pages on your recruitment agency’s website then just get in touch.