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As the job market becomes increasingly competitive, and Paid marketing channels become less cost effective, recruitment companies have to pay close attention to the ever-changing landscape of SEO. Maintaining a website optimised for search engines will help attract more job seekers and employers. The following covers the top considerations for recruitment companies looking to drive growth in SEO. 

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Technical SEO

Not one of the most exciting areas, but a very important one none the less, especially for larger sites with job listings. Technical SEO involves optimising a website’s code and structure to ensure that it is optimised for search engine crawlers, as well as certain areas that impact UX. 

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Site Speed

Recruitment companies should focus on improving the website’s speed, as this will help to improve the user experience and can result in higher rankings, especially on mobile searches. Take this recent client example. Looking at Organic traffic by device, it isn’t too difficult to work out when the site speed changes went live:

As well as more Organic traffic, better site speed has been proven to increase conversion rates in many different studies. If your site performs poorly here, this could be a quick win. Check out your performance in Google’s Tool here: https://pagespeed.web.dev/.  

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Mobile Friendliness 

It’s often a secondary thought, but often Mobile traffic will be the majority of your traffic. Additionally to being fast on mobile, ensure that your website is mobile-friendly from a visual and UX perspective. These are things such as text being too small or buttons being too close together for example. Rather than manually reviewing your site on different phones, just use Google Search Console to check if any pages have been flagged for having issues.  

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Structured Data Tagging for Job Posts

If you have job posts on your site, it’s essential they are properly tagged with Structured Data code. You can check if this is done using the Tool from Google here (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data) and testing one of your live job posts on site. If you have Structured Data code in place, rather than manually checking everything, again you can go to Search Console. Under ‘Enhancements’ you should see ‘Job Postings’. Here you can see how many job posts Google can see, and if there are any issues. Structured Data will help you to get organic visits through Google for Jobs - which can be a huge source of free conversions.

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Content & Keyword Optimisation 

A bit easier to deal with, the optimisation of your content and the breadth of content / landing pages on your site can have a big impact on your performance. 

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Content Quality

Quality content helps to both engage and attract potential job seekers and employers, which is essential for the success of any recruitment company. But quality content is also essential for SEO, as it provides Google with a match to potential relevant searches. If you don’t have a page covering a topic someone has searched for, you are unlikely to rank, so think of landing pages as nets to capture traffic. When creating content, ensure it is informative, helpful, and up to date and is not duplicated from elsewhere.

Engagement signals are now a ranking factor, so making sure content is enjoyable for your target audience is vital. Poor engagement may get you demoted in results.

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Job Page Optimisation

Giving your staff basic lessons in keyword optimisation can go a very long way. If everyone on the team pays a little bit more attention to post titles, and the copy for the role description, visibility in search engines and in job sites could improve drastically. 

Another tip for job pages: include salary information. Our own analysis has shown including an actual salary range rather than ‘negotiable’ will increase engagement and can increase application rates by up to 50%! 

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Link Building & External Signals

Building links, social shares and increasing brand searches will help to demonstrate the importance of your website to search engines and will increase your visibility. This will become especially important as AI tools make production of content faster and less costly. If everyone can produce quality content semi-automatically, the competition in results increases. Search Engines will then need to look at other factors when deciding who to place in results - these factors will largely be the authority signals gained from external factors.

Building external signals requires a holistic digital strategy, leveraging Content Marketing, Paid amplification and Organic Social tactics. It’s a complicated process, so we’ll leave that for another post.

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Conclusion

SEO is an essential part of any recruitment company’s digital marketing strategy. By focusing on the main considerations discussed in this article, you can get some quick wins to boost Organic visibility in search engines and job boards. You’ll also improve your user experience which will improve brand loyalty from clients and candidates.

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