This is a guest post from Yasmin Bibi, account director at HYTN, as part of our Recruiting Weekly Series. Yasmin shares her thoughts on what SEO is and is it worth investing in for your recruitment website?
SEO is Search Engine Optimisation, which is improving your website to increase its ranking on search engines such as Google. The process of SEO isn’t simple and has a number of different aspects, and to make it even more complicated, Google are regularly changing and updating the way websites rank and their algorithms work – so it pays to have an SEO expert staying a breadth to all the changes.
The most important reason investing in SEO is crucial for your recruitment business is because if you’re not investing in it, those Google searches with your keywords will be going to your competitors that are.
Quite simply, if it’s not your website that’s coming up at the top of search engine results, potential clients and candidates won’t be able to find you, but they will be able to find your competitors with highly-optimised websites.
How can I improve the organic SEO of my Recruitment Website?
As mentioned earlier, Google is regularly changing and updating the way they rank websites, but we’ve put together a list of the core steps needed to ensure you have a strong ranking in Google.
Backlinks
What is a backlink? A backlink is when one website links to another. You’ll find links on most web pages, including in this blog. They are an important aspect of SEO, as when a high authority website has a “backlink” to your recruitment website, it gives it credibility, therefore boosting its ranking.
It’s important to build your backlinks naturally and over a long period of time, as Google’s algorithms and auditors will disregard any website with seemingly unnatural links.
Keyword Research
Keyword research should be one of the first things you do prior to writing your web copy. It’s ensuring that you use the keywords that your ideal candidates and clients are searching in Google, so you can appear in their results.
We recommend a professional Keyword Planner, such as Google Ads and Moz to collate your research and then put together your copy. These tools will allow you to establish which keywords are most searched. You’ll ideally want the high-volume keywords with low competition.
Content Creation
QDF. ‘Query Deserved Freshness’. It’s a key factor in the Google ranking algorithm and refers to the verifying of new and up-to-date content on your website. So if you haven’t shared a blog post or updated any text on your website recently, it’s likely to be affecting your ranking. Further to this, Google only likes high-quality content, so your content must be original, have all the relevant keywords, and be in-depth.
Some of our recruitment agency clients use our content creation service to create regular blogs, and others choose to delegate it to their teams, with a different team member writing a blog every other week – whatever works best for your team.
To conclude…
If you’re looking to take your SEO to the next level, it might be worth engaging with SEO experts specifically within the recruitment world. If you’re looking for further advice or support, we’d love to hear from you – you can contact HYTN at hello@hytndigital.com.
Author, Yasmin Bibi – Account Director of HYTN – The Marketing Agency for Recruitment Agencies.
Yasmin is an Account Director at HYTN, working with recruitment agencies to consistently attract and engage new candidates and clients through the power of marketing.
