A Recruiters Guide to SEO: Making a website your No.1 Consultant

SEO was made for Recruitment.

The perfect candidate for your current vacancy, who hasn’t yet come across your recruitment consultancy, will have a very thorough plan when it comes to finding their next career move. This may include networking, referrals, walk-ins and several other avenues. What it will almost certainly include is a detailed search online. In short, if your consultancy doesn’t have an online presence you are effectively letting that perfect candidate,  suitable for your current opportunity (you just know when you meet them!) register with your competitors.

With the recruitment Industry now so oversaturated it is of paramount importance to keep that supply chain of great candidates in touch with yourself. If online job searches didn’t work, there would be no Monster, TotalJobs, et al. Apologies for teaching your grandma how to suck eggs at this point! This you already know. It is, however, extremely common to see Recruitment agencies miss many fantastic opportunities to promote themselves online,  to their audience of great candidates.

This series of publications serve as an essential guide to everything a recruiter needs to know about SEO and Online Marketing. Each Individual blog, and a detailed video to boot, will include crucial information on:

 1. Promoting your Agency Online

2. Creating a Local Presence

3. Posting a Job Advert that Google and Candidates will Love

4. Social Media Marketing and SEO metrics for Recruitment.

Crucial areas that will help to rank will be mentioned throughout, so stay with me! In this first post, we are going to look at promoting your agency online and taking advantage of SEO:

1. Promoting your Agency Online

What would that perfect candidate look like and how would they find you online?

At a boutique level, including a consultancy with only a few branches, it is crucial to understand what that perfect candidate looks like (skills!). How would they find you online? Let’s say you specialise in Sales roles in Leeds, what would the end user search for? If you research this significantly, you may even find a pattern of the actual words used in searches, applicable to other roles.

This is where it becomes crucial to research your “keywords”. At this point your keywords are “Sales” and “Leeds” but is there anything else candidates may use? In your website architecture, content, and job vacancy use the terms that are most relevant to your most common roles and Industry. Also, avoid “In-house” names for roles like “External Business Development Executive” that are quite simple the same role with a name that will filter out great candidates. Not big nor Clever! This particular job title receives less than 10 searches, used with the term “Leeds”. No more questions your honour!

• The word “job/s” is searched for more than “vacancy”, “career” and “opportunity”, put together!
•  If candidates aren’t searching for it, Don’t use it.

Learn what candidates search for using Google Analytics. You can then begin to optimise every part of your site using relevant keywords that candidates are using. Do candidates really search using “staffing”, “resourcing”, or even “employment”. Type into Google any job and location and there will be a pattern emerge relating to your search term, and not the general “no-meaning” words. I’ve never quite understood why recruitment agencies and consultancies use such words all over their websites  as potential clients don’t tend to search for agencies online. Client’s already have relationships in place that you would actively have to pursue if you wanted to win their business.

If in your title-tags (the most important onsite element for ranking) you display “X personnel- homepage”, how can Google know you are the authority in Sales jobs in Leeds. If your on-site structure isn’t formatted right Google has no way to see important information on your site. Your title-tag and page-title, a short description which shows up in search, (a free advert) can be only 65 characters long so use it wisely.

Extra Points at a glance:

• Include links to all of your sector pages from the homepage
• Use main keywords in “Alt tag” for Recruitment Company Logo.
• Display latest jobs on the homepage, if applicable. to drive conversion.
• To discuss On-site architecture in more detail, speak to a SEO Services Company.

If you have several different branches it is extremely good practice to devote a specific page on your site to those locations. This sub-category can then link to the jobs and you can rank on a local basis.

Location is absolutely crucial to Recruitment and our next post will show you how to become the Recruitment authority in your local area.

If you have any thoughts on SEO, in relation to Recruitment, please feel free to comment.