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How To Approach SEO | SEO for Recruitment Agencies

Posted On Thursday, December 10, 2020

Author: David Armitage (Technical Director)

SEO is a big topic, with almost it’s own language formed around it out of lingo and jargon. So it’s easy to understand how one might get overwhelmed or caught up in analysis paralysis when approaching the task. So let’s try and break it down and keep it simple.

Keyword Research


Before you do anything, remember that SEO is completely built around the words that people type into search engines. It is important to establish which words and phrases you want to optimize your site for before you even begin to do any work.


You probably have a general idea of what search terms you want to appear for, but do you know how many people are searching for that term per month in your target location? Do you know how much competition there is for that term? These are things you need to weigh up when picking focus keywords before starting out your SEO campaign. Keyword research will also most likely help you find other terms you didn’t think of before, as well as content opportunities as you discover relevant questions people are typing in, which you could answer.

Onsite SEO


Action time! To start with, just focus on getting your onsite optimization sorted. Onsite SEO is simple shorthand for optimising your own site, as a whole and the individual pages, and has nothing to do with anything on other sites like having other website’s link to yours. So this will cover your content, metadata (stuff that doesn’t appear on the page but is in the code), site structure and a few other technical things like security and speed. Check out our article ‘What do Google look for” to get a better idea.


Fortunately for recruiters, a website with the combination of a decent content management system and a good applicant tracking system implementation will help immensely by auto generating a lot of the content for you. Of course, if you need one of those, then give us a shout!


There will still be quite a few parts of the site which will need manual work done though. Content that isn’t automatically generated like detailed text in category sections, pages focused more at clients, the homepage and blog articles for example.

Offsite SEO


Once you have all your onsite fixed up, and that is a considerable task, then you will want to start looking at offsite SEO. While onsite SEO encompasses a large, varied array of aspects and tasks, offsite SEO basically means one thing, getting other websites to link to yours. These are called backlinks and they are a big factor for ranking. There are two types of approaches to building backlinks...


Black-hat methods


You can do it using black-hat methods, using trickery and techniques that go against Google’s policies.Whilst having the potential to bring you gains in the short term, they will generally hurt your site in the long run as search engines wise up to your ways in their continual efforts to battle this sort of behaviour.

White-hat methods


This is the proper way to do it. Either building links organically through quality content that people will want to link back to, normally promoted with a content marketing strategy, or by actively seeking out backlinks through methods such as guest-blogging or reaching out to high-authority, relevant websites and making arrangements.


If you are interested in getting someone who knows how to properly do SEO for recruitment, the right way, to have a look at your site and tell you what they think, we’re here for you. Even if you are worried you have had some poor, potentially damaging work done in the past or you want a second opinion on something, then get in touch.


Author: David Armitage (Technical Director)

10 Years+ experience building software, job boards, and websites for the recruitment industry.

Please feel free to contact me for a free consultation, a technical review of your website, or information regarding the services we offer.

You can reach me at david@recsitedesign.com or find me on LinkedIn.