With almost 10 million employed people in the UK actively job hunting each day — and the vast majority beginning their job search online — recruiters are inevitably jostling to attract as much of that itchy-footed talent to their websites and job boards as possible. So, how do you ensure that your recruitment site is set up to generate maximum traffic and attract scores of candidates to your job postings? There’s no easy answer, of course, but there are several ways to build visibility and increase the number of eyes on your site.
From optimizing for search engines to creating content that resonates with job seekers, these strategies will give your site the edge it needs to attract top talent. Here are our top tips for boosting traffic to your job site.
Optimize your recruitment site for search engines
When it comes to increasing the visibility of your recruitment site, one of the first steps is to optimize it for search engines; otherwise known as SEO. First off, this means ensuring that your site is structured in such a way that search engines can easily find and index it, with relevant meta tags and keywords. You should also create a sitemap to make it easier for search engines to discover and index your pages.
The next important step is to optimize your content. Ensure that your content is well-written, relevant, and optimized for the keywords you are targeting. You should also regularly update your content to ensure it remains fresh and relevant. This will help you stay ahead of the competition and make it easier for potential job seekers to find your site.
Finally, you should focus on link building. This means creating links from other websites to yours. This will not only help search engines find and index your site but will also give you a boost in terms of search engine ranking. You can create links from other websites by guest posting, writing articles, and participating in forums and discussion boards.
However, you also need to focus on the more technical aspects of SEO, which include your site’s speed. Google’s Core Web Vitals measures content loading speed — among other things — and penalizes pages that load sluggishly. Ensuring your job site loads swiftly means optimizing images and other large files, ensuring your backend code is clean and uncluttered, and investing in a high-performance web hosting solution such as Cloudways.
Looking for more SEO insight? Check out our Winning Recruitment Website SEO Tips & Tricks video, with Nicole Clarke of Shazamme.
Create content that resonates with job seekers
Creating content that resonates with job seekers is another important step in increasing your recruitment site’s visibility. Start by understanding your target audience and the kind of content they’re looking for. This will help you create content that is relevant to their needs and interests. You should focus on creating content that is informative, engaging, and helpful.
The word ‘helpful’ is key here, particularly in light of Google’s industry-shaking Helpful Content algorithm update in late 2022. Whilst it’s important to ensure your content is optimized for search engines (as previously outlined), Google’s latest advice is to create what it calls people-first content — that is, content written for humans, by humans. What does this mean, exactly? Well, here are a few of Google’s pointers:
- Avoid extensive use of automation (AI tools) to generate content
- Try to add value rather than simply summarizing what others have already said (e.g. offer a new perspective or go into greater detail)
- Steer clear of creating content simply because it’s trending (particularly if it’s not related to your industry)
- Keep your content focused on your specific areas of expertise rather than jumping from one unrelated niche to another
- If your content promises to answer a question, make sure you provide an answer
Keeping these points in mind when creating content for your recruitment website — whether that’s a blog post exploring the advantages of remote hiring, for example, or a podcast discussing interview hacks — will ensure it appeals to search engines bots as well as your human visitors, meaning it will not only engage your audience but enhance your ranking potential.
Leverage social media to increase reach
Social media platforms are a great way to increase the visibility of your recruitment site. Start by creating profiles on the most popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, LinkedIn. This will help you reach a wider, more varied audience and increase your overall visibility — 93% of internet users use social media, after all.
One of the advantages of using social media in the recruitment process is that it enables you to reach ‘passive’ candidates who might not otherwise be actively looking for a new role. It’s also a great way of seeing how passionate someone is about their career: do they regularly post about exciting developments in their industry, or engage with others in their line of work, for example?
But of course, it’s ultimately about using social media to drive traffic back to your job site. By publishing and sharing high-quality content — be it thought-leading blog posts, videos or podcasts — can multiply its reach, encourage more backlinks, and ultimately increase the chance of your content ranking highly on search engines.
You should also focus on building a social media community around your recruitment site. This means encouraging people to join your discussion forums and comment on your blog posts. This will help you engage with potential job seekers and build relationships, whilst also increasing the visibility of your website — as your followers will be more likely to share and promote it.
Think mobile-first
In today’s world, where more than 60% of online traffic comes from mobile devices, it’s imperative for your recruitment site to be mobile-friendly. As a minimum, this means ensuring that your site is optimized for different devices and screen sizes: start by ensuring that your site is responsive and works properly on every type of device.
However, with an increasing number of job seekers using mobile devices to access job boards and pursue open positions, it’s not sufficient to simply make your recruitment site mobile-friendly; instead, you should be adopting a mobile-first mindset — which means considering the mobile experience above all others and designing your site accordingly.
Mobile-first means designing an experience that is tailored to mobile users — from building a simplified layout that’s more suited to a smaller screen, to including short, attention-grabbing video content (the average attention span of mobile users is apparently just 1.7 seconds, compared to 2.5 seconds for desktop users). A drag-and-drop web design tool such as Designmodo makes it easy to design engaging yet straightforward experiences for mobile devices.
A mobile-optimized site isn’t just great for user experience, either: Google uses something called mobile-first indexing, which means that it predominantly evaluates the mobile version of a website when indexing and ranking its content. Therefore, a recruitment site designed for mobile job searchers is likely to outrank its less mobile-friendly competition.
Conclusion
Increasing the visibility of your recruitment site is essential for attracting top talent. With the right strategies in place, you can increase online traffic and attract more job seekers to your site. Start by optimizing your recruitment site for search engines and creating content that resonates with job seekers. You should also focus on utilizing social media platforms and design your website for mobile users first. With the right approach, you can turn your recruitment site into a powerful tool for finding the perfect candidates.
