Beyond The Job Board: Mastering SEO For Recruitment Agency Growth

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last decade, you probably already know how important SEO is for business growth.   

But when it comes to recruitment, SEO is even more important. Think about it: the recruitment industry is one of the most competitive in the world - and with more and more agencies fighting for high quality candidates and right-fit clients, every marketing channel is crucial. 

In this blog, we investigate how you can master the science of SEO for recruiting agencies so you can stand out from the competition, attract top talent, and grow your business.  

Ready to get started? Let’s dive in!  

What is SEO? 

Let’s kick things off by going right back to the very beginning. In a nutshell, search engine optimisation is the process of improving your website in order to increase its visibility on search engines.  

The more visible your website is and the higher it ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs), the more likely your business is to be found by your target audience.  

Why is it so important? 

SEO is a holistic marketing channel that drives real, tangible results and allows you to achieve your business goals. Did you know, for example, that organic search delivers 53% of all website traffic? Or that the SEO industry as a whole is expected to total over $170 billion by 2028?  

SEO is more important than ever - but with trillions of searches conducted yearly, it’s also more competitive than ever before, too. That’s why it’s so important to master the science behind SEO so you can make sure you stand out from the crowd. 

The three types of SEO 

There are three types of SEO you need to nail in order to achieve recruitment agency growth: 

On-page SEO: Publishing helpful, high-quality content and optimising that content for users and search engines. This includes things such as meta descriptions, header tags, title tags, and keywords. 

Off-page SEO: Link building, social media, and brand building to support your SEO strategy and help your website to rank.  

Technical SEO: Optimising the technical aspects of your website, such as URL structure, navigation, and internal linking, so it can be crawled and indexed by search engines.  

How to master SEO for recruitment agency growth 

1. Learn how search engines work

First things first: if you’re going to successfully master SEO for recruiting agencies, you need to understand how SEO works and understand the technical processes behind it.  

Once you understand how search engines work, you can ensure that your website is ticking all the boxes and sending all the right signals to Google that it is worth ranking.  

Essentially, the four things you will need to tackle are: 

Crawling - Search engines use crawlers to discover web pages by following links and site maps. 

Rendering - Search engines also generate how the page will look by using information such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. 

Indexing - This involves analysing the content and metadata on the pages it has discovered. 

Ranking - Using complex algorithms, the search engine will determine whether your page is relevant and high quality enough to rank.  

2. Do your research 

Armed with your understanding of how search engines work, you then need to conduct some research of your own before you start putting together your master plan.  

Firstly, you need to understand your target audience by creating buyer personas. Doing so will enable you to understand their demographics, challenges, and pain points so you can start to get an idea of the questions they might ask that you can answer.  

This will then inform your keyword research which will help you to identify what search terms your audience is using. It will also help you understand the value, demand, and competition of these keywords too.  

SERP analysis is another vital part of keyword research because it helps you to understand the search intent for your keywords. Armed with this information, you can then make sure the content you create will boost your visibility.  

3. Carry out competitor analysis

Next up, you should also conduct competitor research so you can understand what other people in the recruitment industry are doing. What are their strengths and weaknesses, and how can you do it better?  

One essential thing to look at are your competitors’ domain ratings and how they compare to yours. DR is a metric used to assess the overall authority and strength of a website’s domain, with higher scores indicating a stronger domain – and if you are aiming to improve your online visibility, DR is crucial. 

Other key things to compare include: 

• How user-friendly their website is 

• How many domains refer to their site 

• How often they publish blogs 

• What keywords and long tail keywords they are targeting 

• Whether their job listings are optimising 

• If they are creating high-quality content  

Finally, it’s super important to conduct a website audit of your own so you can identify what you are currently doing, what’s working, and what’s not. During the audit, you can look at things such as your technical SEO, the quality of your content, your link profile, and how all this stacks up against your competitors.  

Tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console can also help you find areas for improvement - which can then all be used to inform your strategy. 

4. Put together a plan

If you’re going to dominate the search engines and outrank your recruitment rivals, you need to use the information gathered above to put together an SEO strategy that will act as a roadmap to get you to where you want to be.  

Think about your goals and how you will reach them, the timelines you want to adhere to, the KPIs and metrics you’re going to use, and what your budget is going to be. Additionally, you also need to decide when and how you are going to measure and report on your results to keep track of your progress.  

Remember: while your strategy may very well adapt and change over time (after all, SEO is ever-evolving!), your destination and end goal should remain unchanged.  

5. Create high-quality content 

Now we’re onto the fun stuff: it’s time to start creating content that your audience is going to love.  

Content is king in SEO, so if your SEO is going to succeed, you need to create helpful, informative content that your audience wants to engage with. By utilising your keyword research, you can start thinking about what content your audience is searching for, what they are going to want to read, and how you can answer their questions. 

Google has always been big on original, high-quality content – and with their latest core and spam update including a helpful content update which aims to reducing unhelpful, low-quality content by 40%, if you’re going to climb the rankings, your content needs to gain Google’s seal of approval.  

As well as blog posts and articles that address client and candidate pain points, there are other types of content that can help supercharge your recruitment SEO strategy too, such as pillar pages, location pages, job category pages, and industry pages. It’s also a good idea to create pages for each sector and subsector you specialise in as well. 

By acting as an authority on these subject areas, you can show search engines what you already know: that you are a recruitment expert - which will help increase those rankings.  

6. Optimise your content

But it’s not just about creating new content. As part of your recruitment SEO strategy, you will also need to optimise your new and existing pages. 

It’s easy to see why on-page SEO is so important: not only does it have an impact on your search engine visibility, but it also impacts user experience and helps to drive conversions.  

Key things to think about to optimise your content include adding internal links, incorporating keywords and meta descriptions, adding title tags and heading tags, linking out to relevant, trustworthy sites and ensuring that the content is both useful and helpful.  

For more information, check out these proven on-page SEO strategies for recruitment agencies.  

7. Check the technical side

The technical side of your recruitment SEO is absolutely essential to search engine success as it will ensure your website is as structured and search engine friendly as possible.  

By conducting a website health check, you can identify and then correct any errors, which will lead to higher rankings on SERPS. Some key things to look out for include: 

• Make sure your internal and external links are working 

• Check that you are using title tags, header tags, and meta descriptions on every page 

• Ensure that your meta descriptions include keywords 

• Make sure your URLs have keywords 

• Check for any speed issues 

• Make sure there are no toxic backlinks 

• Check for any content duplication, and make sure your content isn’t too short or too long 

• Make sure your images have ALT text describing them  

8. Think about off-page

Once you’ve nailed your content optimisation and smashed your on-page, you need to take a look at your off-page SEO to make sure your overall SEO strategy is as powerful as possible. 

Let’s start with brand building and social media. Although they aren’t technically SEO, they play an important role in visibility and awareness. For example, sharing on social media allows you to reach your audience on numerous different channels, so you can strengthen and build your relationships and build a talent pipeline whilst cementing your position as an industry specialist.  

In addition to social media and brand awareness, another essential part of off-page SEO is building a strong backlink profile so other reputable websites link back to your content.   

Backlinks are a super effective way to build authority and climb the search engine rankings, so it’s important to seek out as many opportunities as possible by guest posting, influencer outreach, and, above all, creating helpful, high-quality content that others want to share.  

When reputable and authoritative websites link to your agency’s website, it signals to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy – which enhances your website’s authority.  

Basically, if you have more highly relevant, high-powered sites linking back to your content than your competition, you will have a stronger chance of ranking higher in SERPs. If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve got you covered: learn more about how to boost your backlinks in this blog.  

9. Analyse, assess, and improve

Finally, it’s essential that you monitor and measure your SEO so you can identify what’s working, what isn’t, and make data-driven decisions about what to do next. After all, if you don’t measure something, you can’t improve it. 

Key metrics to measure include organic traffic, keyword rankings, bounce rates, and conversion rates. By keeping a close eye on how your recruitment SEO strategy is performing, you can identify any challenges or issues that might be holding you back. 

Additionally, after you’ve collected the necessary data, you’ll then need to report on your progress and compare it to previous report periods so you can determine the performance.  

It’s important to remember that SEO is an ongoing process rather than a one-time quick fix. Search engines, users, and competitors are always changing - which means that your processes should adapt, change, and evolve over time, too.  

Ready to master SEO for recruiting agencies? 

If you need help with your recruitment SEO or are struggling to keep your strategy fresh and effective, you’re in luck.  

Here at Angelfish Marketing, we are recruitment marketing experts and have years of experience helping our recruitment clients to craft and implement powerful SEO strategies that drive results. 

If you’d like to learn more about our recruitment marketing expertise, sign up for your FREE marketing report and consultation to discover how we can help you to maximise your marketing channels for optimum growth.  

As part of your free consultation, you will get: 

• A one-hour consultation with a recruitment marketing expert 
• A technical and on-page SEO audit to assess the current health of your website
• A content and social media review to identify areas for improvement