Why Your Recruitment Blog Content Might Be Failing

You’ve got a great recruitment website and you’ve been writing blog post content for months or years now and you’re not seeing a return on the time you’ve invested. A lot of recruitment agencies fail to see the value in blogging so they can easily abandon their blog if they don’t see a return early on in the process. My old recruitment blog on my Media Square Recruitment website (RIP) used to rank in the top 3 spots for most related search terms and was often above many very well-known consumer websites. My current blog on abstractionlabs.co.uk isn’t quite at that level yet but is starting to get great traction in long tail searches (long tail searches are generally searches involving 5+ words and tend to have lower traffic levels when compared to smaller generic searches). 

Website Analytics

How are you measuring the return on investment? Is your website integrated with Google Analytics 4 or some sort of tracking tool such as CandidateHub? Are you tracking page views? Where are those users based? Where do they navigate to after viewing that blog post? Before determining if it is broken or just could be doing better, let’s look at the data behind the pages and the user’s journey. 

What Does Success Look Like?

What do you want to get from the blog on your recruitment site? Are you trying to generate traffic? Are you trying to get your blog to rank higher in the search engines? Is it for brand awareness? Do you want to be seen as an expert in your niche? 

And how are you defining failure? You might look at the page view analytics for each of your blog posts and see only single digits but you need to remember that those single digits are likely to be highly relevant and highly engaged users. Also you may only get one page view per blog but if that page view is a brilliant candidate who’s perfect for a live job then I wouldn’t view that as a failure. 

Targeting Short Or Long Tail Keywords?

Let’s differentiate between “short tail keywords” and “long tail keywords”. For my website a short tail keyword may be “recruitment website design” and a long tail keyword would “how to create a website for my recruitment agency”. Long tail keywords see less traffic volume but it’s going to be a lot easier to rank higher for those keywords. Plus any traffic you get for those keywords are likely to be more relevant to what the page is offering and your services in general. Aim for long tail success early on and then set your sights on short tail thereafter. 

Your Blog's Audience 

Before writing out a list of headings for your blog posts you need to work out who your audience is. And put together personas within each of these categories. For example you’ll typically have three groups of people visit your website, candidates, clients and recruitment consultants potentially looking to work for your firm. Within each of these three categories you’ll have different personas so for example you may a client not actively hiring for a live role but maybe looking to review their PSL, or you could have a client at the early stages of hiring for a live role or maybe a client who has spoken to and used a half dozen agencies on a live role and has got nowhere so far. Work out who these personas are and then write tailored content for them.

Content Quality

Writing is incredibly tough! Actually let me rephrase that, writing good content is incredibly tough. Even the most famous authors of our time weren’t truly appreciated in their day or threw away hundreds of pages of their work because they felt it just wasn’t good enough. Don’t despair - keep writing, keep reading and keep practising and you’ll get there as we do with all things. 

One big point I’d like to add is do not simply copy and paste content directly from Chat-GPT or Gemini Advanced. The major search engines can detect when you use AI generated content and they will penalise you for it. Feel free to use it for a skeleton or to generate ideas to talk around but don’t just copy and paste it over! 

Consistency

Put together a content plan based on a calendar and try to tie content into particular parts of the year. Maybe you hire for the retail sector and they start to push their Christmas hiring drive in September so you could write content around this or maybe there’s an award season condensed into a few months within your sector and you could write a piece about awards shows before this season kicks in. 

Also make sure there is some consistency to your blog posts. There’s nothing worse to see than a blog which is sporadically updated here and there - maybe a blog post once a month then 3 times a month. Stick to a regular pattern - ideally weekly. 

Content Tone

People tend to like certain genres of films or books and will tend to stick to them quite rigidly because they know what roughly to expect. Same with newspapers, you won’t see someone buying the Guardian one day, then The FT the next day and The Sun after that. People like what they like. Your blog should try to stick to a set tone or you should limit who writes for the blog to just 2 or 3 people and each of those authors stick to a set personality when writing. 

Sharing Your Content

You can’t just expect people to search for your blog on Google, the large majority of the time you’ll need to shove it in their face. Share across your social media channels and directly send it to clients, candidates & partners who may find it useful. 

Also include social sharing buttons at the bottom of each blog post so readers can easily share it with their connections on LinkedIn, X or Facebook. 

Is Your Blog Indexed On Google?

There’s a few things we should check to ensure people can actually find your blog posts. 

Firstly, let’s check that your blog posts are part of your sitemap.xml. Uh?! What’s a sitemap.hefjaeuf?! Your sitemap.xml file lists all of the pages on your recruitment website, or at least it should do. If you have a WordPress website then it should be using a plugin called Yoast SEO, which does this automatically. If you’re on a website template builder such as Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy and the newly created blog post is set to public then it should automatically update your sitemap.xml file. My sitemap is located at abstractionlabs.co.uk/sitemap.xml.

A great way to check if your blog posts are findable on Google is by seeing which pages Google has indexed. Simply open up a new Google Chrome browser tab and search for the following - “site:domainname” so mine for example would be “site:abstractionlabs.co.uk”. This will show you all the pages Google has indexed. Simply Ctrl + F and search for “blogs” or whatever sub page route houses all of your blog posts. Are all of your blog posts listed there?

If your recruitment blog posts aren’t being indexed on Google or maybe some of them are missing we can carry out a “quick fix” and add them manually via Google Search Console. If you haven’t set this up yet then you’ll need to spend a little time doing so but it’s straightforward and well worth the time to do so. Once it’s set up simply copy the blog post URL you want to add to Google and paste into into the search bar at the top of the page, which has the placeholder text - “Inspect any URL in domainname” (domainname is your website URL) and hit Enter. Then click “Test Live URL”, this may take a couple of minutes. If Google can index it (as in there’s no error message here) then click “Request Indexing” - this should take a few seconds for the request to be sent. And voila! All done! I would give it 4-7 days and check if the URL is on Google using “site:domainname”, replacing domainname with your unique website domain. 

On this note, a more long term fix should be added though your recruitment site and a system should be set up where each new recruitment blog post is added to the sitemap.xml file and then that should be submitted to Google Search Console each time a page is added, edited or deleted from your site. 

SEO Optimisation

Once you’ve written each blog post you’ll want to try to add some keywords to it to ensure it’s fully SEO optimised. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to generate ideas for suitable keywords around a particular topic and then pepper these into your post. Try to maintain readability, peppered with keywords here and there.  

Meta Tags

Meta, like Facebook? Nope! Meta tags are pieces of descriptive text on each page, which tell search engines what your page is about. There’s about 30 different meta tags we could use but we’re just interested in around ten... 

<meta charset='UTF-8'>

<meta name='keywords' content='your keyword phrases that describe the blog post'>

<meta name='description' content='a description about what the blog post is about>

<meta name='subject' content='your website's subject'>

<meta name='language' content='EN'>

<meta name='robots' content='index,follow'>

<meta name='author' content='company name'>

<meta name='url' content='http://www.websiteaddrress.com/blogs/blog-posts-are-failing'>

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Each of your recruitment blog post pages should have these meta tags listed. These tags help search engines to work out what the page is about and how to index and list it. You can check to see if your recruitment blog post pages have these meta tags by navigating to the page, then right click anywhere on the page and select “View page source”. This will generate a new browser tab with some colourful code. At the top of the page you should see these tags listed. If they’re not then it should be relatively easy to add them to your Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy or WordPress website. If you have a more complicated website built using a frontend framework or library such as Angular, React or Vue then you may have to ensure these tags are added dynamically to each page while using Server Side Rendering. 

Robots.txt File

Just a quick mention but it’s worth checking your robots.txt file. It’s a very simple file but sometimes I see it set up incorrectly. This file tells the search engines whether or not they can index your website on the search engines. 

You can view this file by navigating to “domainname/robots.txt” so for example mine would be “abstractionlabs.co.uk/robots.txt”. A simple file should look something like this… 

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Don’t Sell

Write your blog for your audience and not for yourself. Think about what’s in it for them? People will read your blog posts because they want to learn something and that’s it really. Don’t try to sell to them and don’t be overly promotional. 

Page Layout

But they do count for a lot. There’s a fair few developer blogs I read that don’t particularly look great but their content is extremely good so I can forgive them for that. It’s not going to be the reason people keep coming back to your blog but it certainly helps if the blog looks cool, professional and is easy to navigate. Space out your text, include headers and sub-headers, highlight keywords and add internal links to other pages and relevant blog posts.  

Call To Action

Each blog post should contain internal links to other parts but it should also have a call to action towards the end of the blog post, otherwise you risk losing the readers interest and them navigating away from your website. Try to guide them to the contact page or maybe the jobs page - a section where they’ll be forced to reach out to you or an area of the website where they’ll need to make a positive action - such as sending their CV to you. 

If you’ve implemented everything here already and you’re still not seeing results then feel free to get in touch and maybe we can talk you through some other options, which may help.