In today’s digital space, recruiters who still rely on outdated methods for hiring right candidates face huge difficulty. Do you know why? The majority of job seekers of late search for a job online. Among the 34% of Americans who job hunted in the past two years, 90% used the internet to research jobs, and 84% applied online. To attract them, job providers should opt for SEO for recruiters.
The major advantage of search engine optimization for a recruitment firm is that it boosts their ability to show what your targeted and qualified applicants search for. A proper SEO boosts visibility and thus portrays them as a talent hub. It tantalizes qualified candidates while showing the agency as a reliable partner in your industry.
To leverage the maximum advantages of search engine optimization, you need to formulate a solid strategy that yields maximum benefits. In this guide, we will discuss strategies for SEO for a recruitment agency. Let’s explore more.
What is SEO for Recruiter?
Recruitment SEO, as the name suggests, is a search engine optimization that is exclusively for a recruitment agency. It involves crafting strategies that emphasize on ways users look for career opportunities and jobs.
Recruitment search engine optimization utilizes impeccable strategies to career pages, boost job postings, hiring-related content, and more. They are visible in search outcomes when candidates search for jobs.
The entire process of recruiters’ SEO involves determining how your target candidates look for jobs and creating content accordingly to match their habits. This approach works with keyword usage with the right strategy and also creating useful, detailed content that supports different stages of the search process of job seekers.
You need to understand that recruitment SEO is not only about individual job ads – it also redefines everything about your online hiring presence. It includes content, career pages related to your resources and culture in some particular industries.
Modern recruitment SEO process includes several things, such as technical parts like adding structured data markup to let Google for Jobs. It makes websites mobile-friendly. Besides, search engine optimization also includes voice search 40% of users report day-to-day use of voice assistants.
Why Recruiters Should Opt for SEO
Choosing SEO for recruiters makes them entitled to get numerous advantages, right from increasing online visibility to creating long-term value. We will discuss these along with many other benefits as well.
- Boost Visibility
SEO is useful for job listings to boost their search engine rankings and thus maximize visibility to potential candidates. It results in higher organic traffic to your career pages while letting you grab a wonderful chance to lure the right talent.
- Enhance Candidate Quality
Another most promising benefit of search engine optimization is that it entices job seekers who look for specific skills, roles, locations, etc. It ensures the reach of your job listing to the right and the targeted audience. It also boosts the quality of applicants and thus minimizes the necessity for the screening process, which is indeed a time-consuming.
- Long-Term Value
Those marketers who invest in SEO consistently with either a properly maintained or increased budget witnessed its value in increasing traffic. It’s also useful to attract potential candidates as well. You need to keep in mind that SEO strategies compound over time. It yields long-lasting advantages for a recruitment agency as well.
- Improve User Experience
Most online job seekers gather details about recruiters through their online content instead of their traditional paid advertising. It makes a fully optimized and user-friendly career page vital for luring potential candidates.
- Cost Effectiveness
Though the process is long, SEO is indeed a cost-effective process. It’s an ongoing marketing effort that needs a well-defined strategy. That’s the reason why most recruitment agencies, especially those who have limited budgets, opt for SEO. It boosts high-quality traffic even without recurring ad costs.
Top SEO Strategies for Recruiters to Improve Results
A proven SEO strategy for a recruiter combines numerous latest practices to maximize results. Let’s explore all those practices in-depth.
- Target Specialized Keywords
We are aware of the importance of keywords in SEO. These are basically phrases or search terms users type in Google while searching for any information. Search engines find websites by using these terms or phrases properly and rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).
It’s advisable to always focus on using specialized keywords, whether it’s in your website or LinkedIn profile. But, now the important question is, how would you determine the right keywords? The answer is none other than ‘Keyword Research’.
What is Keyword Research
Well, keyword research is an activity that serves its core purpose to find out and analyze keywords. With keywords, marketers get a complete idea to understand user intent, boost SEO strategies, and target relevant content.
Effective keyword research is necessary to magnify website visibility, maximize the chance of higher search ranking, and entice the right audience. So, how will you perform keyword research? It’s not something that you can perform manually.
You will come across a large number of tools available online. Some of the popular tools are as follows;
- Google Keyword Planner
- SE Ranking
- SEMrush
- Aherfs
Most of these tools are available with free (limited) and paid versions. So, you can use any of them to discover the targeted keywords. These tools not only provide keyword lists but also other important details like search volumes, competition, cost per click (CPC), and more. It indeed helps you in making the right decision to use the right keywords.
For instance, we will leverage the “Keyword Magic Tool” of SEMrush to find some keywords for a recruitment agency. And let’s see the results. For instance, we insert a keyword “Entry Level Hiring”. And you can see results as follows;
The result displays everything we already discussed above.
Search Volume
Search Intent
Competition
Analyze Competitor’s Keywords
It’s another proven method to shortlist the finest keywords. You need to analyze competitor’s job listing and keywords. Doing this lets you get details of keywords your competitors use. It also helps you determine the type of jobs they post and gives you a complete understanding in terms of the things you can focus your efforts on.
For instance, we use SEMrush for competitor analysis.
You need to just put your competitor’s name in the above blank box and analyze everything about them, including keywords they use. For instance, we put ‘Indeed.com’ in the blank box and let’s find out the results.
Use Location-Based Keywords
If you wish to boost the possibility of displaying in candidate searches for jobs nearby, implementing location-based search terms into your keywords helps you manage it better.
Doing this helps you make it convenient for interested candidates to search for job offerings relevant to the location where they live or seek to live. It indeed gives you a complete edge against many other recruiters who use more generic keywords.
Apart from this, it also gives you the possibility to reach even those areas that have a higher unemployment rate. It’s advisable to create content for a specific region.
- Optimize Job Posts
If your job posting is not ranking in search engines, it will be invisible to your potential candidates. You can consider implementing the following important practices to help your job posting rank well.
- Use the targeted keywords in your job posting. It’s advisable to use keywords like “Full Stack Developers Las Vegas” rather than targeting “versatile Software Engineer”.
- Structure your Job Post: To structure your posts, you can use bullet points, clear job titles, integrate the right HTML tags, and more. You can use the right HTML tags in H1, H2, and meta description.
- Maximize your job postings with highly structured data to appear in this search engine dedicated to recruitment.
- Create Quality Content
Recruiters who have a lot of experience in the industry can start a blog. You need to understand that blogging is quite advantageous, whether it’s for job hunting or your career. It’s pivotal to craft valuable content that can highlight your name among your competitors and provide value to your target job seekers.
Whether it’s online visitors or search engines, they go through and analyze the content to decide what is relevant and valuable. Therefore, it’s a good decision to spend extra time to create quality content. This strategy serves its core purpose to prompt potential job seekers to come back to your website to gather useful information. On the other hand, it also enhances the SEO ranking of your website on the search engine results.
Meanwhile, if you wish to improve your brand image as a leading and trusted recruiter, you need to understand that articles are not enough. Another important thing you need to do is to interact and engage with your potential candidates through blogging and social media. For instance, you can post either general information or job-hunting advice.
Best Practices to Create Quality Content for Recruiters
You can follow the guidelines below to create top-quality content that lures your potential clients.
- Publish reports and surveys that show employee satisfaction. You can highlight several benefits that have already been implemented in the organization.
- Your job description should be crafted in jargon-free and clear language.
- Publish behind-the-scenes content related to team events, employee stories, and leadership culture.
- Post authentic images or videos over stock images.
- Publish content that educates and informs your potential candidates.
- Use different formats of content, including carousel images, LinkedIn posts, short videos, etc., for improved engagement.
- Technical Optimization of Recruitment Page
You need to understand that a website that has a poor structure and slow page speed often struggles to get visitors. So, you need to be careful of the following important things that are an important of on-page SEO;
- Loading Speed
Make sure your website loads fast without letting users wait for more. It should not take more than 2s to load. You need to minimize the size of the image you post and also never forget to optimize code for an improved user experience.
- Adapt the Website to Mobile
With the growing usage of mobile search among job seekers, recruiter website needs to be mobile responsive. They need to test the mobile responsiveness of their website to check whether it appears on mobile properly or not.
- Optimize SEO Tags
The next important thing you can do is to write compelling and crisp job titles and meta descriptions. It helps you encourage more clicks.
- Create Quality Backlink
As an important part of off-page SEO, backlinks are highly important not only to improve online visibility but also to build credibility. These are mainly links that recruiter website gets from other reputed websites in the same industry.
They reflect search engines about the importance of your website and also the way it is liked or related to various other domains. Therefore, earning valuable backlinks helps you move up in the search engine results.
How to Earn Backlinks for your Recruitment Website?
Following are some of the tried and tested ways of getting backlinks from some other websites;
- You can achieve the same with the help of article publishing, guest blogging, and some other ways. Besides, you also need to keep in mind that a website with important backlinks will be visible higher in search engine results compared to websites that have fewer relevant links.
- Collaborate with influencers and industry experts to maximize reach and backlinks.
- Get quoted in podcasts or news articles.
Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlinks
Analyze your competitor’s backlink profiles to gather details of sources and also the number of links every competitor has. It indeed provides you with complete details about their marketing strategies and also shows where you missed a chance to create links. To get a competitive edge, you can proceed with a strong link-building strategy.
To analyze it, you can leverage the backlink tool by SE Ranking. It helps you examine profiles from different angles and get various parameters required for a complete analysis. SE Ranking offers you complete information regarding competitors’ backlinks, page quality scores, and information on their domain.
Here, we inserted “indeed.com” as a competitor to analyze backlinks. Let’s find out the results.
- Make your Website Mobile-Friendly
As we already mentioned, today’s younger generation uses mobile devices when it comes to searching for jobs. It increases the importance of mobile-friendly websites for a recruitment agency.
Search engines also give more preference to those websites that are mobile-friendly. In other words, you will get two important ways for Google to rank your recruitment website – for mobile and desktop. You need to set up your website in a better way to let users discover you easily.
Tips on Making Your Website Mobile-Friendly
- Select recruitment-based Content Management System (CMS). For instance, you can use either Jobify or SmartJob Board.
- Go for custom development by using tech stacks like HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and also many frameworks such as Laravel, Next.js, and React.
- Focus on responsive and mobile-first design. For this, you can do several things such as using a responsive layout, vertical scrolling, easily readable font sizes, buttons, and more.
- Improve speed by compressing images, enabling lazy loading, minifying CSS, JavaScript, HTML, using a fast web host and CDN, and more.
- Include forms that are easily accessible through mobile with mobile-friendly input and auto-fill.
- Use Social Media
Social media is a powerful platform and is best for promoting your job opportunities. Most hiring managers and recruiters leverage social media platforms most frequently to increase the popularity of their positions and also encourage potential candidates. You can use several social media platforms to ensure that a number of candidates get your message properly.
Some of the top social media platforms recruiters leverage most frequently are as follows;
These platforms are considered to be go-to platforms that help in sharing any type of information, be it job listings, employment opportunities, or company perks.
Tips to Promote Your Job Listing Through Social Media
Create an attention-seeking job post
You need to create an attention-seeking job post with a strong hook at the start. Your posting should include many important details such as location, role, salary range, and more. Make sure you highlight the benefits properly. Never forget to add a proper call-to-action: “Apply Now”.
Use Hashtags Properly
The next thing you need to do is to use the right hashtags to increase discoverability of your content. You can use many hashtags such as #JobOpening #Hiring #CareerOpportunity, etc.
Apart from this, you also need to use industry-related tags like #MarketingJobs, #TechJobs, etc. Never forget to use location tags such as #RemoteJobs, #BostonJobs, #NewYorkJobs.
Leverage Visual Content
It’s advisable to use high-quality and eye-catching videos and graphics. It indeed makes the biggest impact on job seekers and gives them every reason to look for jobs. Make sure you use consistent templates and company branding.
Promote on the Right Platforms
It’s equally important to use the top platforms for job posting. Following are the social media platforms you can consider to leverage;
- LinkedIn: It’s one of the top platforms, especially for professional roles. It’s advisable to post in LinkedIn groups and also prompt employees mainly to share.
- Facebook and Instagram: These are the right social media platforms for culture-based or visual promotions.
- Twitter: It’s the top platform to publish snappy and short posts with hashtags.
- TikTok or YouTube: It’s the best platform for employer branding or creative job ads.
Engage with Comments and Shares
The next important thing you can do is to interact with your target candidates frequently in several ways.
- Respond fast to any questions or interest
- Make conversation more active to improve organic reach
- Be thankful to people for sharing
- Use SEO Tools
By using SEO tools, you will be able to gather important details about the performance of your content. These tools help you make decisions based on data and thus optimize your recruitment search engine optimization accordingly.
- Google Search Console: It helps you determine the actual keyword ranking. Besides, you can also use it to resolve any technical issues.
- SEMrush: It’s another popular tool that helps you analyze competitors’ keywords and thus grab various new opportunities for your posting.
- Google Analytics: It’s one of the reliable tools that help you determine user behavior and optimize your content according to what works best.
- Hire a Professional SEO Company
Hiring an SEO company helps recruiters get a win-win situation for several reasons, improving their online visibility, staying ahead in the competitive world, and attracting the right talent. You will get some other advantages as well.
- An SEO company assists a recruiter in completing various tasks such as optimizing web pages, job listings, content, etc., to rank higher on search engines. It allows job seekers to find recruiters conveniently.
- Be it content strategy, keyword research, or technical SEO, they possess unmatched expertise in performing multiple tasks. They also help in building an impeccable digital presence.
- Recruiters can outsource their tasks to SEO experts to save both time and resources. And they focus on major hiring activities.
Challenges in SEO for Recruiters
Recruiters often come across numerous challenges while performing SEO for their websites. Due to this, they often get deprived of achieving final objectives. Let’s discuss each challenge in-depth.
- Not Properly Optimized Career Page
Candidates often avoid accessing those pages that are complicated to navigate or load slowly. It thus prevents recruiters from hiring skilled professionals for their vacancy.
Pro Tip: You need to craft a user-friendly design that loads fast and navigates easily. You can also organize job listings through categories and ensure the entire application process is mobile-responsive and simple.
- Lack of Keyword Targeting
Your job listings can go unnoticed when you fail to target the right keywords. In this case, your jobs will not be visible in search results when candidates look to grab opportunities in your industry.
Pro Tip: You need to do proper keyword research to find out the related ones for your jobs and also your targeted candidates. We already mentioned various tools for keyword research. You can use any of them.
- Vast Competition for Top Talent
With a large number of organizations hiring for the same roles and positions, it’s really tough to gain the attention of skilled professionals. It may also cause your job posting to go unnoticed.
Pro Tip: You need to highlight the culture of your organization, growth opportunities, work-life balance, and more. Use SEO properly to push your listing in search results.
- Lack of Quality Backlinks
When it comes to quality backlinks, they play an important role in improving the ranking of your career pages in search engines. You need to get links from authoritative websites to your job listings to improve the appearance of your pages on the first page of search results.
Pro Tip: You can develop relationships with recruitment websites, industry blogs, job boards, and more to earn backlinks to your website.
Wrap Up
SEO has redefined the way companies catch attention and hire top talent. It’s advisable to optimize your job postings, career pages, and leverage the best SEO tools for beginners to improve visibility and also hire top candidates. Get in touch with a professional SEO company to find the right solutions, whether you are a recruitment agency or an HR department.
