Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an approach to marketing and business growth that has been around for a while now. It’s not a tactic that yields instant results, but it’s one that can reliably bring an increase in the number of people who view your website and its content, consequently growing the number of leads who eventually convert to clients or candidates.
The range of techniques that fall under search engine optimization is vast, and there are plenty of tactics that many businesses leave up to SEO experts (like specialist marketing agencies!) But there are some very simple things you can do that will make a difference to how your recruitment company’s website ranks in search results, none of which require a significant amount of technical expertise.
Here are five of our best pieces of advice that you can put into practice today.
A common problem that many of our clients come to us in the first place with is that they have put a lot of time and resources into building a sophisticated website for their agency, and it’s simply not getting enough traffic every month to generate any business.
Another is that visitors are arriving on their website but quickly leave again, and none of them are actually interested in what the agency offers.
Both of these problems can be solved by search engine optimization.
SEO works by using a variety of different techniques to improve both the quantity and the quality of organic traffic that arrives at a website through organic search results. By increasing a site’s ranking and visibility in search engines like Google, more and more people find it through relevant searches which massively increases the chances of a new client or candidate reaching out to work with you.
Keyword research is another part of SEO, which uses various tools to identify common phrases that people are searching for. By using this information, you can ensure that web users who are searching for phrases directly related to your recruitment offering will find you first, increasing the likelihood that leads will convert into clients.
Research has shown that over 50% of traffic that is trackable comes from organic search. That means that half of the visits your website is currently getting can be boosted by SEO.
Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of that?
SEO is a long-term marketing approach that leads to consistent growth when done properly. Whilst it does require patience and some technical know-how, it’s a tactic that almost guarantees a positive difference in how your agency’s website is performing.
Read on to discover easy ways that you can start implementing these changes today.
Page speed is a simple aspect of any website that you’re unlikely to ever give much thought to. But it’s actually a factor that can have a huge impact on how well your site ranks in search results.
Google did a study that found the probability of a customer bouncing from a page goes up by 95% when the loading speed increases from 1 second to 5 seconds. That’s a huge amount of potential customers who are never going to see your website just because it took a few extra seconds to load.
A fast loading page doesn’t just reduce the chance that a web user will get bored and click back to find another search result. It’s something that search engines like Google look for when they’re deciding where a website should rank, pushing sites with faster page speeds higher up the list of results.
One of the simplest ways you can improve a site’s SEO yourself is by improving the loading speed of your landing pages.
The easiest and most effective way to do this is to start by compressing the images you have on your website. Whilst huge, detailed pictures are a highlight of many recruitment websites, reducing the file size before you upload anything will make a big difference to how long a page takes to load.
Plugins are another feature that you may not realise are adding dangerous seconds onto your site’s loading speed. Once you’ve checked all your images are a small enough size, we recommend that you do an audit of the plugins on your website and delete any of those you can do without.
Finally, switching to a high-quality website hosting service is a brilliant way to improve page speed. Whilst this can be an expensive approach, platforms that have fewer sites are less likely to slow your website down, so it is a change that is worth paying for if you want to make a significant difference to your website SEO.
Finding popular search phrases that people use when looking for recruitment companies like yours is an essential part of any SEO strategy. You can find these keywords and data on their search volume using keyword research tools, of which there is a range of free and paid options.
At Growth Recruits we use Ahrefs for our keyword research, but there are other platforms that provide similar information.
Every keyword research tool works differently, but in most cases you’ll begin by entering a certain word or phrase related to your agency or recruitment and you’ll get a list of similar search results that indicate the phrasing your audience is using and what other topics they are looking for.
For example, if you’re an agency that specialises in working with marketing businesses, you’ll find popular phrases like ‘digital marketing recruitment agency’, ‘recruitment agency for marketing jobs’ and ‘sales and marketing recruitment’.
For a more in-depth introduction to keyword research, we recommend this article.
Once you’ve done keyword research to end up with a list of relevant phrases, an easy way to start adding these to your website content is to optimise the title tags of every page.
A title tag is another word for the page title that will be visible at the top of the search result for your site and the browser tab when the page is open. First and foremost, a title tag should tell you what is on the page, but if you can you should also try and fit a keyword phrase in there as well, in a natural way of course.
For example, if you’re trying to target the phrase ‘digital marketing recruitment agency’ then you might make the title tag for your home page ‘Company Name | A Specialist Digital Marketing Recruitment Agency in London’.
A survey found that 36% of SEO experts believe title tag optimization to be the most important element of on-page search engine optimization. Don’t leave it out of your strategy.
Another piece of easy SEO advice that uses simple keyword research is optimising the meta-descriptions of your website pages as well.
A meta description is the HTML text that describes the content that is on a webpage to both the web users and the search engine. It should be easily editable from your website control panel (CMS) or if you have an SEO plugin on your site builder.
By including keyword phrases in your meta description that you know potential clients and candidates are searching for, you’ll indicate to the search engines that your content is more relevant. This will lead to higher rankings for the included keywords and therefore more visitors to your site.
As with optimising title tags, you should only ever add keywords to your meta description if you can include them in a natural way. Also remember that short meta descriptions are more effective than long ones, so try to keep things as concise as possible.
Finding relevant and related keyword phrases to optimise your landing page content is one strategy in SEO, but another is taking this keyword research a step further and using it to inspire the longer pieces of content that you publish on your website, such as blog posts.
With this kind of keyword research, you’ll want to target what is known in the industry as ‘longtail keywords’. This term refers to keyword phrases that tend to be a few words long, have very specific intent, and don’t often have a very high search volume.
For example, ‘why use a recruitment agency to find a job’ is a longtail keyword.
The point of using these phrases as the basis for content is that the competition in the search results will be limited. If you produce a long-form piece of content that solves the problem the phrase is posing, has been optimised with lots of keywords and is more informative than anything currently published online, the chances that you’ll rank in one of the top spots in the search engine results is high.
Not only will having highly ranking content on your website mean that more people find it, but the greater the number of high ranking pages on your site, the better your overall search engine ranking will be.
And if you still need more persuading, data from Smart Insights found that longtail keyword phrases have up to a 5% higher clickthrough rate than more general ones searched by web users.
It’s the best approach to ensure that your content is going to get read.
Link building is a bit tricky topic when it comes to SEO. It’s quite a simple strategy to get your head around, but whilst it can massively improve the visibility of your site in search engines, it can also quickly have a detrimental effect.
Some kinds of link building fall under Black Hat SEO, which is a series of techniques that are viewed in the industry as unethical or deceptive ways of building well-ranking websites. Black hat link building involves creating lots of inorganic links to a website to try and boost its ranking, which often disappear after a short while or cause the entire site to get blacklisted.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, organic link building is a great way to improve your agency website’s SEO and gain more traffic from other places on the web.
Firstly, internal links are important to have on your website, as they indicate to search engines which pages are the most important. If you have particular landing pages that you want to increase the amount of traffic to, first focus on building as many relevant links to these pages as possible from other pages on the site.
External links from relevant, established websites make a bigger impact on your site’s ranking, as these demonstrate to search engines that your site has good authority on a topic. It will also increase the quality of the traffic that your site gets, as users will come from sites that are similar to yours.
The most straightforward way to begin building quality links is simply to create high-quality content about recruitment or your industry that other people are going to want to read, refer to and share. If you’re publishing valuable and insightful pieces of writing and sharing them on all of your channels, the chances that others will also engage with them are high.
Another good way to generate external links is to encourage clients and candidates to write reviews. Not only do you gain a link from a site that will be viewed by other members of your target audience, but you’ll also (hopefully) receive the kind of praise that will mean more potential clients or candidates will want to work with you!
Building partnerships with other agencies or businesses in a similar sector of the industry can also be a great way to gain external links, whether you’re writing guest posts, creating PR campaigns or just promoting each other’s services. On a simpler level, you can just ask coworkers or connections in the industry for a link on their website to yours, potentially in return for a link or piece of content on your site.
According to data from Ahrefs, nearly 91% of all indexed pages on the internet never get any organic traffic, primarily because they don’t have any backlinks. Don’t let the pages on your website become a part of this statistic – link building is easy to start and a great way to boost visibility.
About the author
Tom Mcloughlin is the Director of Growth Recruits. A passionate marketer, he loves sharing his ideas with the industry and helping people take that knowledge and use it to get extraordinary results.
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