Tired of spending a fortune on job listings and advertising boards? Smaller recruitment agencies can't compete with the budget of big-time companies with an already established audience, making it a lot more difficult to find suitable candidates and seekers.

This is where the power of SEO for recruitment agencies comes in. SEO stands for 'search engine optimisation', which is exactly what these roles undertake.

In a crowded market, optimisation strategies can help you bring yourself to the forefront of the internet and search results without the need to break the bank.

So how can you capitalise on the power of SEO? First, we'll review some of the most important search engine optimisation tips for recruitment companies. We'll then go over how an agency for recruitment can help you out. 

Search engine optimisation involves more than just finding keywords. From the technical set-up to on-page optimisation, there are several crucial factors to consider if you want job seekers to find you. For increased traffic and a higher chance of securing potential clients, search engine optimisation is your best move.

Don't forget that appearing at the top of search engine results pages means that your potential clients are guaranteed to discover your services and automatically increase your chances of getting more work without investing too much in paid advertising.

Top SEO tips for recruitment companies

SEO involves more than just keyword research. From the technical set-up to on-page optimisation, there are several crucial factors to consider if you want candidates to find you. As a recruitment agency, you'll need to consider how to draw traffic to each page on your website.

Whether you're helping candidates find jobs or helping businesses compare hiring costs, SEO is pivotal.

So let's jump in.

Gain a basic understanding of how it all works 

Before you get the ball rolling with your SEO campaign, step one is getting a basic understanding of how Google ranks content. Even just a general overview can help inform your practices as a recruiter hoping to attract quality candidates. Your goal is to find your way to the top spot on search engine results pages.

Four key factors help Google decide what ranks:

• Quality: In 2024, keyword stuffing won't help you. The quality of your content is the most important of all. 
• Keywords: Keywords give Google a rundown of what your content is actually about so they can determine the relevancy for users. 
• Images: Google wants relevant, quality images that add value to content. Do more than your basic stock images. 
• Authority: If you want to rank on the first page, you need educational, authoritative content that serves a purpose. Avoid creating content for the sake of creating content. 

Find powerful and relevant keywords 

What are job seekers and high-quality clients likely to be searching for on the internet? To find out, you'll need to do some keyword research. To find the right keywords, think about who you're trying to attract. Remember, as a recruitment agency, your keywords need to make sense in the realm of the recruitment industry.

Your keywords should be specific and include your industry name, employment title, location, and business name. You'll need to consider the search volumes on targeted keywords, understand the user's intent behind the keyword, and seek out related terms. 

As a simple example, let's say you're often trying to fill roles for financial management positions and you want to attract more active job seekers in finance to your page as part of your search engine optimisation campaign. Your focus is therefore on finding and securing these clients.

Your first step would be to use one of the free or paid keyword finder tools to find keywords related to the term “financial manager” since that's the main role you're trying to fill. A few good keyword and search engine tools include: 

• Google Keyword Planner
• Semrush 
• Ahrefs Keyword Explorer 
• Moz Keyword Explorer 
• Lighthouse
• Google Search Console

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So let's try using Ahrefs keyword explorer to find some search terms related to “financial manager”.

If we consider the intent of the searches, it's clear that the top two terms “financial manager” and “financial manager salary” are both possible searches by active job seekers. 

Next, we'll look at some terms related to “financial manager” to see if there are any other keywords that make sense to use. We'll use Google's Keyword Planner to find keyword ideas.

A couple of highly searched related terms include “manager finance” and “finance manager pay”. So, we'll add those to have 

• financial manager 
• financial manager salary 
• manager finance and
• finance manager pay 

as our target keywords. So we have the keywords, what do we do with them? 

Your keywords are strategically placed across your webpage, the technical structure, and the content you post. With this, you'll boost your search engine ranking and begin to draw more clients to your website. 

Optimise on-site SEO 

On-site optimisation is essentially incorporating your keywords into different elements on your website pages.

A few of these key elements are: 

• Page headline: The title of your page should have the keyword included. So if you have a job listing for a financial manager, make sure “financial manager” is part of the page headline. 
• Subheadings: Add related keywords to your subheadings where possible. For example, a subheading could be “financial manager salary”. 
• First 100 words: The first 100 words of your page should always include your main target keyword. For example, an ad for a financial manager position might say “PwC is seeking a qualified financial manager to join their team of experts.”
• Metadata: Metadata plays a key role in search engine optimisation. The meta description, meta title, and meta tags should include your target keywords and related keywords. 
• Images and video: Adding relevant and engaging multimedia to your pages can help you rank. Videos of client testimonials or case studies, interactive infographics on your services, or pictures of your current team can all improve authority. 

On-site optimisation is essentially incorporating your keywords into different elements on your website pages to help them rank higher. A few of these key elements are: 

• Page headline: The title of your page should have the keyword included. So if you have a listing for a financial manager, make sure “financial manager” is part of the page headline. 
• Subheadings: Add related keywords to your subheadings where possible. For example, a subheading could be “financial manager salary”. 
• First 100 words: The first 100 words of your page should always include your main target keyword. For example, an ad for a financial manager position might say “PwC is seeking a qualified financial manager to join their team of experts.”
• Metadata: Don't underestimate the importance of metadata. The meta description, meta title, and meta tags should include your target keywords and related keywords. 
• Images and video: Adding relevant and engaging multimedia to your pages can help you rank. Videos of client testimonials or case studies, interactive infographics on your services, or pictures of your current team can all improve authority. 

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Create high-quality content 

Putting out quality content can help you attract job seekers and drive more web traffic, ultimately improving its domain authority and your ranking on Google. So how can you create quality content? 

Optimise your title tag

Creating content is important for attracting clients, and selling that content as appealing is of paramount importance. 

Your title tag is the first thing potential employees and job seekers are going to see. You need a title encouraging your target audience to click while standing out from other recruiters. 

Keep the title under 60 characters to ensure it's properly displayed on search engines. You can use a title preview tool to review. 

A compelling title promises value and creates consequences. If your headline doesn't promise value for your readers, they have no reason to click on it. If there is no consequence to missing out on your article, what's the point of checking out the article?

Another key tip: don't be overly clickbaity when trying to draw an audience in. If a reader clicks on your piece of content only to find out they were misled by the title, they're unlikely to ever come back.

Keep it relevant, engaging and informative 

Okay, you've got a good title. Now the content needs to match. Your content needs to provide real value to your audience. This means it needs to be accurate, original, educational and engaging. 

As a recruitment company, this means creating content that appeals to high-quality clients who are actively seeking employment. For the sake of the above example, if we know we're often trying to find financial managers, we should create content that appeals to exactly them. 

Writing a blog post about CV tips for financial managers or a guide on landing your dream financial manager job will likely appeal to active job seekers and quality job seekers within finance. 

Get technical 

Now, things can get a little complicated here, and you may need some assistance, but it's an important consideration nevertheless. 

Optimising the technical factors means improving your website's crawlability, indexibility, and general performance in search rankings. A few ways you can improve your technical search engine optimisation include: 

Create a clear and logical website structure that is easily navigated 

Smart internal linking that goes to relevant pages within your website helps search engines understand the structure of your website. 

A strong structure helps crawlers find your website easily and quickly. Your pages should be organised in a logical hierarchy.

For example, your homepage should link to category pages, and category pages should link to individual subpages within the website. 

Good  structure helps avoid ending up with orphan pages, aka, pages with no internal links leading to them. Adding links to orphan pages on non-orphan pages is an easy way to resolve the problem. 

Create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google 

An XML sitemap is essentially a file containing all of the important pages of your brand. It provides search engines with additional information covering which pages you have and where to find them. 

Your sitemap can be found at one of these two URLs:

• (insertwebsite)/sitemap.xml
• (insertwebsite)/sitemap_index.xml

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You can use to submit your sitemap to Google. 

Understand and optimise indexing 

Search engines crawl your pages to try to analyse and understand their content. The search engine then stores said pieces of content in its search index, a massive database with billions of different web pages. 

If your webpages aren't indexed, they're not going to appear in search engine results. A great way to check if your pages are indexed is to perform a “site:” operator search. 

Basically, you type “site:(insert URL)”  into Google's search engine, and they'll you how many pages from the Google has indexed. 

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You can also search the specific URL to check if an individual page on your site has been indexed. 

Find and fix duplicate content 

Google hates duplicate content. While you won't be penalised for having similar content on multiple pages of your site, it can lead to undesirable URL ranking in search results and backlink dilution. 

There are plenty of tools you can use to audit your site and find duplicate content issues. These include: 

• Semrush 
• Moz  tool 
• SEOptimer 
• Ahrefs

Improve your page speed 

The faster your webpages load, the better. The speed of your site is a crucial ranking factor for both desktop and mobile devices. 

Google's Page Insights tool is a reliable method of checking your current speed. A performance score is given out of 100, and the higher you score, the better. 

A few simple ways to improve your site speed include: 

• Compress your images: A range of image optimisation tools exist to help you compress large image and video files. 
• Use a content distribution network: A CDN stores copies of your web pages on servers throughout the world and connects visitors to the nearest server. 
• Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files: Removing unnecessary whitespace and additional characters from code will reduce file sizes and improve speeds.  

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How SEO agencies for recruitment companies can help 

All of this may be a little too much for you to consider as a recruiter, and SEO agencies with a range of services can be a big help in this regard.

An SEO agency for recruitment companies is essentially a business that specialises in improving the overall search engine ranking of staffing agencies through robust SEO services. They'll take charge of your strategy and help you take your digital marketing to the next level.

In general, this means a team of SEO experts performing a full marketing audit and spearheading a comprehensive and strategic plan to help you achieve your desired results. The SEO services on offer can play a huge role in boosting your brand's online visibility.

Let's run through the full process of working with an SEO company to give you a clearer overview of how it all goes down. 

Step 1: Consultation and goal setting 

The first consultation you have with an agency will be to give them information covering your business, target audience, and marketing goals. 

As a recruitment company, your goal is most likely to attract qualified clients to your website and improve conversions. The SEO specialists will likely ask questions to find the type of job seekers you're looking to attract, the most common roles, your existing metrics and your desired goals.

Step 2: Identify the challenges via a full site audit 

The next step is to identify the challenges that lie ahead. To do this, a full site audit is performed to help find gaps, notable issues and anything else relevant to search engine optimisation. 

The audit helps the agency identify the strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement of the website. They'll answer questions regarding the challenges and explain what happens next. It covers technical SEO, URL structure, site speed, mobile friendliness, indexing issues, and crawlability. 

The results of the full site audit give the agency a clear idea of what needs to be done to reach the desired goals. 

Step 3: Keyword research and competitor analysis 

Getting the strategy right is key. First and foremost, this means finding the right keywords. The SEO agency considers search volume, competition, and relevance of keywords when deciding on which to prioritise. 

The search engine optimisation company then performs a competitor analysis to review your competition's strengths, weaknesses, keywords used, and any opportunities you could capitalise on. 

Step 4: On-page and technical SEO 

Based on the findings from the full site audit and keyword research, the SEO company will begin to implement on-page and technical SEO optimisation strategies. 

From meta tags, broken links, and duplicate content to headings, internal linking and images; everything is optimised. 

Step 5: Content strategy and creation 

The content strategy is incredibly important and is based on the target audience and keyword findings. The SEO agency essentially takes charge of your content to keep it fresh, relevant and of the highest quality. 

Each piece of content is SEO-driven and created to drive organic traffic to the website. As such, the content created will appeal to job seekers and qualified employees. This means creating blog posts focused on recruitment, salaries, CV and resume tips, and more. 

Step 6: Link building 

Link building is an important part of improving the authority and credibility of your website, and stands out as one of the most pivotal SEO services. The search engine optimisation company you're working with will acquire backlinks from trusted websites, prepare guest blogs, find suitable partners, and more to consistently keep your domain authority high. 

Step 7: Monitoring and reporting 

Getting an SEO strategy right involves constant testing, tracking and reporting. Without detailed monitoring and reporting in place, businesses will never know if the strategy is working or not. 

The SEO agency will continuously monitor the performance of your site via powerful analytical tools, and provide regular reports covering important metrics such as organic traffic, new users, keyword rankings and conversions. 

Step 8: Ongoing optimisation 

Search engine optimisation never stops, it is an ongoing process that requires constant review. The SEO agency will regularly refine the approach and content based on performance data and changes in search engine algorithms. 

If something's clearly not working, the agency will immediately take steps to rectify it and consider an alternative approach. Remember, SEO comes with no guarantees, and your strategy may have to be alternated multiple times.  

Case Study

An Employer of Record agency based in Cape Town South Africa, set up their job board for recruiting remote workers according to our SEO guidelines, and although it took some time, as all good SEO strategies does, they managed to enhance the quality of their applications from 40% to 90%.

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Summing up 

SEO for recruitment agencies forms a major part of the employment landscape, as it directly impacts the visibility and digital presence of different recruitment companies. Recruiters can capitalise on the power of SEO by applying the above tips to their marketing and content strategy. 

The best move, however, is to work with experienced experts who already understand the full SEO journey and what it takes to compete in a crowded market. Recruitment agencies need to attract job seekers without breaking the bank, and search engine optimisation is the most reliable way to do exactly that. 

At SEO Rocket, our experienced experts are skilled at preparing optimised content to boost your organic search ranking. With our help, you'll no longer need to spend a fortune on job board advertising and listing, and will instead have clients find you. All businesses need good search engine optimisation strategies.

If you'd like to learn more about our SEO-driven services, don't hesitate to give us a call and speak to one of our qualified team members today.