AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

Over the years we have found that one of the most common ways recruitment agencies leave money on the table is by neglecting to acquire a large enough share of the online search market. Because they are unsure which online marketing methods, traffic streams and digital strategies generate the most leverage for the least effort and investment, they tend to waste a sizable share of their marketing budgets on methods that just don’t work.

For example, when looking for a new job, candidates generally don’t look on Twitter or search Facebook for jobs. They don’t generally look at Linkedin either, so spending ages adding contacts and then messaging them with new available jobs can be a big waste of time. Try it, you’ll see.

What the vast majority of them do is exactly what you would do – they search Google and more often than not they refine their search queries to include keywords related to the job title and location. This stands to reason, but you would be surprised how much marketing budget is wasted on social media and other channels that just don’t produce the results people expect.

By achieving higher Google rankings, via SEO, in both the natural and the paid search results our clients enjoy more visibility and more engagement from those looking for their service. But here’s the thing, achieving high visibility in Google means more than just adding your target keyword phrases to your pages and job listings then hoping for the best. The competition is way too high for that to work, so you or your digital marketing agency will need to up their game with a better understanding of how Google works, and how the recruitment search market thinks. 

For example, if you are a recruitment firm in the health sector you not only need to add the obvious words such as “Health” and “Recruitment” to your page’s content and metadata. You also need to include a number of modifier keywords (modified variations of your target keywords) such as “recruit“, “recruiters“, and “recruiting“. This is a great way to ensure Google understands the semantic meaning of your web pages, without resorting to outdated techniques such as “keyword stuffing” the same keyword phrases in your page elements over and over again.

Furthermore, to qualify your web pages to rank in a larger number of other “long-tail” search queries that your search market uses, you would be well advised to include qualifiers keywords such as “medical”, “doctor” “nurse” and other phrases related to the employer’s name and location. Again, this allows your page to qualify to be listed in the results for a whole range of related keyword phrases that you may not be aware of.

Another mistake many recruitment agencies make when uploading jobs to their site is to forget to add the words “job“, “vacancy” or “position” simply because they are uploading it to the “jobs” section and forget to include these super-essential words. Google isn’t psychic, you need to include these words more than any other – so now is the time to go and check your content editor knows to add these obvious words to each job listing on your site.

The above basic keyword strategies and others, such as clever internal linking methods that help channel the “ranking power” of each target page, are essential for achieving top natural Google rankings for keyword phrases where the competition is high. And a checklist of known win-wins is one the most important things your team can have at hand to help them get the most benefit out of all the work gone into posting content on your site.

Not only will these proven methods help your pages achieve higher positions in the organic search results they can also reduce the cost for each click you would pay for in Google’s paid search results. Of course, without pro Pay Per Click tools you may not know how much your competitors are bidding on keywords in their Pay Per Click advertising campaigns. But by achieving better “quality score” your Google Ads will achieve higher positions for the same cost or the same position at a lower cost. Freeing up a share of your budget to invest in other methods known to convert this increased traffic into leads and sales.