How to improve your recruitment agencies SEO
As someone that has experience in hiring and firing, including the pressures of needing to recruit someone into a role in record time, I have worked with lots of recruitment agencies. Some of them were recommended to me, others called me and pestered me until I gave in to a meeting; but when I really, really needed results quickly, I searched the internet for firms that looked reputable enough to approach directly.
I’m obviously not in recruitment, but surely this is a valuable client to have? When they’re desperate to recruit someone, they come to you, you find the perfect candidate and voila – you’re at the top of the list for every other time they need to use an agency.
Being found by people searching for recruitment agencies on Google is pretty valuable.
How having a website doesn’t mean you have digital marketing covered
Having a presence online in the form of a website does not mean that the people you want to find your website, will do.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is how you ensure that your website is found for the recruitment services, sectors and locations that you specialise in. In an ideal world, your website would rank in position 1 on search engines such as Google, so that people who are searching for a certain term find your recruitment agency’s website because it is most relevant to what they are searching for.
Example:
Between 100 to 1,000 people in the UK search for recruitment agencies on average every month, by putting the words ‘recruitment agencies in Leicester’ into Google. The search results that they are greeted with are broken down into advertisements (which are often ignored, in favour of ‘organic’ search results), location based results (these are the ones beneath a map, which offer links to directions or the agencies’ websites) and then the highly coveted 10 organic website listings, which complete the ‘first page of Google’ results.
Using Leicester as an example, at the time of writing this, when searching in such a way that Google won’t recognise websites I’ve previously clicked on (and so rank them more highly based on my personal usage) the results on the first page of Google feature the following Leicester based recruitment agencies’ websites:
Location search results
- Regional Recruitment Services
- Quest Employment
- Maloy & Flynn Ltd
Organic results
- Agency Central
- Maloy & Flynn
- Regional Recruitment Services
- Reed
- Hays
- Robert Half
- Quest Employment
- Thorn Baker
- Leicester Mercury directory
- Indeed
Why is it so important for recruitment agencies to feature on the first page of Google?
People very rarely venture onto the second page (only around 10% of searchers will look on Google’s second page of search results) before they either click through to a website that they think will have what they’re looking for, or before they disregard that search and start a new search, using different wording.
More interesting yet, is that research has found around 50% of people will only ever click on the top 3 organic results. In this case, whilst I’m pulling my hair out trying to recruit someone quickly, the only agencies that I’m going to bother getting in touch with are either the top three in the location search results, or the top three in the organic results.
How to improve recruitment agencies SEO
If you would like to improve how well your website is found using search engines, we can help. There are tips and techniques that we can either work with you together on, or advise you about so that you can give it a go yourself. Either way, by improving your website and your digital marketing, you will find that when people really need a recruitment agency, you’ll have far more chance of them calling you in the future!
