SEO for Recruitment

    What is SEO?

    SEO stands for search engine optimisation. SEO is a strategy that involves techniques and tactics to increase the amount of organic visitors and traffic to a website page by obtaining a high ranking position in search engine results pages (SERP). SEO is a kind of online marketing that utilises data, often from websites like Google Search Console, in order to make informed decisions on how to help you rank higher in Google search results and other search engines.

    How do you do SEO?

    There are three parts of SEO strategy, on page SEO, off page SEO, and technical SEO that each have their own part to play in optimising website pages to rank higher in search results on search engines, like Google. SEO strategy will play into where you appear on job boards such as LinkedIn, Google Jobs, and Indeed.

    It’s worth noting that SEO strategy changes frequently as Google search and other search engines make changes to their algorithm. Google’s algorithm is a secret that is well guarded, but SEO professionals will often share their strategies and help online for free. The sharing of knowledge makes it easy to ensure that you have the basics of SEO down and can implement SEO strategies to get your job posts and career pages on the first page.

    How does SEO for recruitment agencies work?

    SEO in recruitment is a very useful tool that can help you optimise your web pages and your job listings to make them more visible to people searching on search engines. We’ve put together a few of the basics of SEO strategy that you should know for your recruitment agency.

    On Page SEO

    On page SEO is the content on actual web pages, optimising on page SEO involves the structure of the page, including the page title, heading tags, optimising the meta descriptions, ensuring alt text is in place, and making sure that the text on the page includes a certain amount of your keywords and the words that relate to that keyword.

    Keyword Research

    Keyword research is the process of identifying the terms and phrases that job seekers are using when searching for job postings online. You can research keywords by looking at competitors, finding related keywords, and coming up with a cluster of words that could be surrounding the term. For example, if you’re searching for Recruitment SEO, a related keyword would be meta description, since meta descriptions are a part of doing SEO work.

    Don’t forget to check for search volume and difficulty when you’re doing your keyword research so that you aren’t optimising for keywords that have low search volume.

    Optimise job listings

    Optimise your job postings by incorporating keywords into the text of your job, including the job title, description and metadata. Make sure that your job posting is descriptive, and has informative content that would make a candidate likely to search and click on.

    Content creation

    Another key part of on page SEO is to create content that is helpful, informative, and has your keywords in the text. You could write blog posts, articles, guides, and resources that are related to the job search. A recruitment website could have a blog post about job search tips, career advice, interview preparation, industry insights, or anything else that targets the keywords you’ve researched.

    Off Page SEO

    Off page SEO is the process of getting other websites to link to your website, to increase your website traffic and establish authority. These external links can help demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about to search engines and help Google establish who has trustworthy websites. This is typically better handed to a dedicated SEO specialist as they will have strategies that can increase your rankings without you having to focus on it and not your recruitment.

    Technical SEO

    Technical SEO is the process of making sure that your website is running properly and is easy for a search engine to read and process, a procedure known as crawling. Bear in mind that this should also include making sure a web page is mobile friendly. This type of work is typically something to hand to a developer or team member that knows how to code, as some technical SEO issues can require in depth knowledge, like structured data, internal links, URL structure, alt tags, canonicals, 301 redirects, etc.

    However, under technical SEO, there are plenty of more simple things that you can do if you don’t know how to code. For example, writing the alt text (that goes with the alt tag) of an image, writing the meta description that appears in the actual google search results page, amending duplicate content, etc.

    Are there any tools to help with SEO?

    There are tons of software that you can use to help improve your search results for your recruitment agency. Depending on the scale of your recruitment agency, you can even find free tools to help with your search engine optimisation.

    And so many others. Determine the best software to help you find the right keywords to optimise your career pages, job postings, and get more traffic to your recruitment website.

    All SEO, whether seo for recruitment, or for your own website, takes time. Most SEO efforts won’t see significant progress in the search rankings for 6-12 months. There are some quick wins that can help with any recruitment strategy, but it’s worth doing proper research to ensure that you will be helping your web page, not hurting it. SEO progress is slow, but changes are fast.