Recruitment Marketing 101 - #4 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Bristow and Hardy’s Recruitment Marketing 101 blog series aims to provide senior recruitment leaders with a number of simple techniques to implement when it comes to recruitment marketing.

Blog #1 focused on customer personas , in blog #2 attention turned to social media, followed by blog #3 where we looked at email marketing... Click Here To View The Other Blogs In This Series

For the fourth blog, I wanted to discuss Search Engine Optimisation, also known as SEO. It is an incredibly important area of recruitment marketing that very rarely gets the attention it deserves. The blog is ideal for agency owners, senior leaders and marketing teams who would like to gather a basic understanding of how SEO works, as well as steps that can be taken to improve it. I begin by introducing SEO, understanding its benefits and limitations, before then providing the reader with a series of simple tips to implement.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

In a recruitment marketing context, SEO relates to the actions that an agency takes to improve the amount of organic traffic going through to the website, along with the quality of that traffic. The most basic way of explaining SEO is to see it as where you rank on google e.g. are you on the first page or are you not even on the first one hundred?

This is typically done in two ways; making on-site website changes to improve the quality of content and also off-site actions that drive people to the website itself.

We recommend SEO for agencies who are looking to acquire new clients, although it does work for candidate attraction too.

The way that SEO works is by focusing on a series of key search terms. You base these search terms around what you want to be found for on google. For example, if you’re a technology recruiter and based in Manchester, then one of your search terms may be “Technology Recruiters in Manchester”.

SEO has many benefits, however, the ability to win large/retained contracts is likely to lead to the highest return on investment (ROI).

The key limitations of SEO are the fact it is very time consuming, and you do not typically see short term results – which often causes people to give up, providing others with an opportunity!

Click Here To Receive A Free SEO Report

3 tips to improve SEO at your agency

1.      On site changes

· Start off by running an SEO report – we can do one for free here

· The report will provide you with information on how to optimise your website. Based on my experience, this is likely to include:

o  Ensuring that titles are the correct length

o  Having meta descriptions for each of your website pages

o  Having a keyword that is used consistently across the page in the correct positions e.g. in the first paragraph

· The speed of the website is also taken into account when it comes to SEO

2.      Off-site

· One important SEO process that most agencies do not have in place is back linking. Back linking is the process of sharing links back to your website across the internet. For example, sharing links in forums, blogs, industry bodies, and industry-specific websites (e.g. blog on REC).

· Ensure that you frequently share links across your social media channels

3.      Other tips

· Ensure that you carry out thorough keyword research to ensure that your search terms will generate results

· Regularly review your content and consistently update it

· Produce reports to monitor the progress of your work

· Consider investing into solutions such as SEM rush - https://www.semrush.com/

· Blogging is a really great way to rank higher for specific keywords

Click Here To Receive A Free SEO Report

Conclusion

As a long-term strategy, SEO is critical as it provides the foundations of any good-quality recruitment marketing strategy. Although it is time consuming, the potential return that can be generated typically leads to an ROI.

If you’d like to learn more about SEO and how we could support you, then drop me a message on LinkedIn or contact me on [email protected].

Harry Wright

Business Development Manager

Bristow and Hardy

www.bristowandhardy.co.uk