This is a guest post from Samm Green, Co-founder at Few & Far, as part of our Recruiting Weekly Series.
Welcome. In this article, we are going to enlighten our fellow recruitment companies about the wonders of SEO and how it can help your website and your job searches. Let’s jump right in.
What Is SEO?
SEO is the acronym used for Search Engine Optimisation, which is the art and practice of increasing your website traffic, both in terms of quality and quantity, through organic search engine (like Google and Bing) results. To do great SEO work, you must make progress on several fronts, including:
- Keyword Research
- Link Building
- Content Marketing
- Content Quality
- Technical SEO
Let’s give you some tips on each of these aspects so that your recruitment company can benefit.
Tip One: Try to Understand Google’s Algorithm
As Google is the predominant search engine, we are going to use it as the example going forward in this piece, but the advice is also applicable to other search engines. Google sends crawlers out into the internet to retrieve information about absolutely everything, which it then builds into indexes and uses to answer your searches. So, with all of that information, how does Google rank it in a way that is useful to the person doing the search? Well, it gives different weight values to each of its different ranking factors; for example, the biggest ranking factors are:
- Quality and quantity of links to the domain
- Quality and quantity of links to the pages
- Keyword and content quality on pages
- The content length, readability, and uniqueness
- Mobile-friendliness
- Page Speed
- Meeting user intent
The better you understand all of the factors and their varying importance, you’ll know where best to spend your efforts.
Take a look at Cyrus Shephard’s SEO success factors guide for a great insight into all the different ranking factors and how influential they each are.
Keyword Research
Keyword research will inform which words and phrases you strongly implement and embed into your content, which in turn will provide you with a huge amount of ideas for the content that you create for the site. A website will feel cold and empty until it is publishing relevant, useful, and regular content that has been informed by SEO keyword research.
For any recruitment company who wants to embrace keyword research, you can start by finding out all of the most common search terms and queries for the industry, as well as which search terms are leading the most traffic to your site, and begin developing your research from there.
To get started with keyword research, take a look at Ahref’s article, which details 10 free keyword research tools.
Link Building
For recruitment companies, link building is an absolute must. Developing strong bonds with other websites which can refer and redirect talented job-hunters to your domain is something that should never be overlooked or undervalued. The more relevant the partners, the better, so for recruitment companies, you should be looking to generate links from recruitment blogs, career development websites, and for platforms that are geared towards recent graduates.
For even more link building tips, check out this great beginner guide from Moz.
Content Marketing
Traditional marketing is more akin to advertising, whereas content marketing involves getting creative and putting together various forms of digital multimedia, such as videos, podcasts, blogs, guest posts, social media posts, and more. The aim of this material is not to directly advertise or promote the brand in question, but rather to stimulate interest in the products or services. Doing this is not as challenging as it sounds.
If you’re a recruitment company trying to develop a content marketing strategy, you can look at what other successful recruitment companies are doing and glean ideas from them. You can follow your keyword research. You can see what questions people are asking Google about recruitment and make Q&A style content using your expertise. You can write blogs targeted at people who just lost their job, graduates who are looking for a job, professionals who want a career change and more. You can offer tips, you can make downloadable guides, and you can even interview candidates you’ve successfully placed! Take a look at Backlinko’s content marketing guide for some more content marketing insights.
Knowing all of this, you have to consider something else about your content…
Content quality is more important than content quantity
A thousand useless blogs will not be as impactful as ten really well thought out and curated pieces that are unique, compelling, interesting, and actionable. Images and videos should be of high quality, optimised, and engaging for the viewer. Search engines like Google have been known to punish websites who post duplicate or spammy content while promoting websites that offer high-quality content to their audiences. Keep this in mind when curating recruitment industry content.
Technical SEO
For the technical side of SEO, we recommend hiring a specialist to make sure your website is set up and optimised for its relationship with Google, Bing, and other search engines. You need to be sure that these search engines can crawl and index your websites effectively so that your content is finding its way to people making search requests. James Hubbard’s SEO audit checklist will give you a range of potential technical issues to check.
Author, Samm Green – Co-founder at Few & Far
Samm co-founded Few&Far in 2013 with Nick Charalambous. Few&Far finds digital companies at the forefront of technology the talent needed to design, scale, and build products and services globally. They’ve worked with clients all over the world including Starling Bank, Babylon Health, Typeform, Agoda, Tesco PLC and World Remit.
