Angelfish Marketing Blog

The starting point

As a recruitment agency, getting the right candidates from the right areas is a tricky task in itself, not to mention attracting and retaining the right clients. Throw in a lack of social media presence, sporadic marketing campaigns, poor site optimisation, and an over-reliance on traditional, interruptive marketing techniques, and this task becomes even more of a challenge.

This is the situation our client found themselves in before they came to us. They weren’t hitting their business goals and their website traffic wasn’t as high as most of their competitors’ were. Basically, they needed a marketing plan for a recruitment agency that would boost candidate acquisition - and they needed it fast.

Without question, SEO’s impact on business today is considerable. While more people than ever are turning to search engines such as Google to find relevant information and the internet becomes ever-more saturated with competitive content, employing SEO good practices is now fundamental to your business success. So how can we keep our heads above the vast body of water that is SEO?

In one of our latest blogs, we highlighted that Google - among other search engines - makes up 55% of candidate’s job searches. In fact, in 2017, Google launched its very own Google for Jobs suite in America, and shortly afterwards, included a dedicated job search tool as part of the suite. Since then, the feature has been rolled out internationally.

There’s no denying it; competition among recruitment agencies to find the best candidates is growing bigger by the year. In fact, it’s now thought that UK recruitment is the world’s most competitive market. What’s more, unemployment is currently at 3.8% - a 45-year low - and in 2018, the majority of employed individuals were satisfied with their job and weren’t looking for a new one. So not only is this all making finding any candidates at all a challenge, but it seems that finding the very best candidates who have the talent needed to succeed in the roles on offer is especially difficult. In fact, approximately three quarters (72.8%) of recruitment agencies in 2018 struggled to find relevant candidates for their clients, with  45% having difficulty filling positions because of talent shortages. 

In today’s increasingly online world, it comes as no surprise that 60% of consumers now make purchasing decisions before even speaking to a sales rep. So, knowing that your prospective customers are likely to go to your website before coming to you, it’s important that you optimise your website so it's easy to find, exciting, engaging, easy to navigate, and as enjoyable to use as possible. 

If you're a business owner, you should already know that having an attractive website is essential if you want new customers and clients to find your business and purchase your products or services. But there's more to having a strong online presence than simply putting up a couple of pages about your business; you should also have a blog in your marketing plan for several reasons, including improving your SEO and the overall effectiveness of your online marketing. 

The challenge

Five months ago, we started working with a recruitment consultancy, M&E Global, who specialise in subcontracting work for the defence industry. Over the past 20 years, they’ve been offering a range of project solutions, supporting various global military contracts. They take a well-rounded approach to recruitment, not only finding their candidates jobs but also supporting them throughout the entirety of their contracts. This holistic approach to recruitment is what makes M&E unique, working closely with both candidates and clients so that all parties get exactly what they need.

With 55% of marketers saying that blog content creation is their top marketing priority, it’s clear to see that marketing strategies are moving from traditional, ‘outbound’ techniques to more up-to-date, ‘inbound’ methods where it’s all about enticing people to engage with the business. Producing blog content is a great way to offer potential leads something valuable so that, when they’re at the point where they’re ready to make a purchase, they pick you over your competitors. Plus, the stats are pretty promising: marketers who prioritise blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see a positive return on investment (ROI) and content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising. 

Continually writing creative content can be exhausting, especially when you’ve got a department to run. The writing process takes up so much time - from topic creation to final draft, there are a lot of steps involved in creating just one piece of content. But as a marketing manager, controlling the content your business outputs is absolutely essential - after all, you need it to pull in the right customers for the company. However, when you throw in planning and running a successful SEO marketing strategy to the mix, you’ve suddenly got a lot of pressure weighing on your shoulders and a lot to control.

In the past couple of years, there have been significant changes to the way Google’s search engine works. Google used to deny that social media has a direct effect on rankings, but now, social media URLs appear in search engines at a much larger scale. What we all really want to know is whether social media sharing actually helps improve search engine ranking. So, how closely linked are SEO and social media strategy?