SEO for Recruiters

A Step-by-Step Recruiter SEO Guide

Are you ready to attract more applicants to your recruitment agency through organic search? Keep reading to learn how a targeted SEO recruiter marketing strategy can help you get found by potential applicants online.

In this guide you will learn:

Chapter 1
Intro to SEO →

Chapter 2
Keyword Research →

Chapter 3
On-Page SEO →

Chapter 4
Off-Page SEO →

Chapter 5
Best Practices →

Chapter 6
FAQs & Resources →

What is SEO for recruiters?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a website or web page to increase its visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. For recruiters, SEO is crucial in ensuring that your job postings, company information, and recruitment pages appear at the top of search results, making them easily discoverable by potential candidates.

The higher your page ranks in search engine results, the more likely it is that qualified candidates will click through to your site. Think of SEO as maintaining the “health” of your website. SEO ensures that your website is properly structured, optimized with the right keywords, and accessible, so it can attract more traffic and increase the visibility of your job openings to the right audience.

A person searching for a recruiter on Google may use a search query like “recruitment agency near me” or “best recruiters in [industry] in [city name]”.

They may search for specific services such as “IT recruitment specialists” or “executive headhunters”. Or they may even include specific hiring needs in the search query, such as “temporary staffing agency in [city name]” or “remote tech recruiters”.

In order to benefit from SEO, you want your website to rank for these kinds of searches.

Why is recruitment SEO important?

Here are some of the benefits of utilizing SEO for your recruitment business:

• Increased visibility: SEO helps boost the visibility of your job listings, company page, and recruitment efforts on search engines, making it easier for potential candidates to find you when they search for job opportunities in your industry.
• Cost-effective: Compared to traditional advertising methods like job boards or print ads, SEO is a cost-effective way to attract qualified candidates without the high costs associated with other recruitment strategies.
• Targeted audience: SEO enables recruiters to target specific keywords related to job positions, industries, and skills, ensuring that the right candidates find your listings when they are actively searching for opportunities that match their qualifications.
• Local SEO: Local SEO is particularly valuable for recruitment, allowing you to increase visibility for candidates searching for jobs within a specific geographic area. This is especially useful for companies looking to attract local talent.
• Building trust: By providing high-quality, relevant content (such as job descriptions, career resources, and employee testimonials), SEO helps establish your company as a trusted and authoritative source in your field, attracting top-tier candidates and building a strong employer brand.

How do search engines work?

Search engines work by crawling billions of webpages with their own web crawlers, known as search engine bots or spiders. These are then stored and saved in an index.

Google Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines)

The Google Search Essentials define the actions that webmasters can take to make their websites better indexable or crawlable.

Read them here: Official Google Guidelines

The guidelines are based on three central aspects:

1. Crawling – webmasters should support Google in finding websites.
2. Indexing – webmasters should help Google to classify and “recognize” the content.
3. Usability and user experience – webmasters should support the users of the websites in their use (usability and user experience).

Essentially, according to these Google guidelines,  a website should support the search engine in crawling and indexing and ensure a good user experience. 

Before you get started with SEO, there are a few prerequisites you want to check off first:

SEO Basics

At a bare minimum, you want to make sure you cover these basic standards before embarking on doing SEO:

• Website Speed – Have a fast loading site so potential customers don’t get tired of waiting for things to load.
• Mobile Friendliness – Make sure your site works on mobile as over 50% of users browse on mobile devices
• Analytics – Setup Google Analytics, Google Search Console & so you can understand what is and isn’t working.
• XML Sitemap – search engines use this to get your site’s URLs
• Robots.txt – tells search engine crawlers where they can (and where they can’t go) on your site.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of making website and server optimizations to help search engines to crawl and index your site more effectively (and therefore help to improve organic rankings).

Technical errors can hurt a website’s ability to rank. There are potentially a lot of errors, but here are some of the most common that will have the biggest impact when fixed:

• 404 errors
• Broken backlinks
• Poor URL structure
• Duplicate/thin content
• Poor internal linking
• Poor website architecture
• Missing metadata (page titles & meta descriptions)
• Missing H1 tags

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What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that people use when searching for specific products or services:

Once you understand the keywords your target audience is using, you can optimize your website to appear for these in search results.

Keyword research is like a diagnostic tool for your recruitment strategy. It helps you understand what potential candidates are searching for online when they are looking for job opportunities.

For example, if you’re hiring for marketing positions, keyword research might show that terms like “digital marketing jobs” or “content strategist openings” are commonly searched by job seekers. By identifying these popular keywords, you can optimize your job postings and website content to rank higher in search results for those terms.

This ensures that your job listings appear in front of the right candidates who are actively looking for roles that match their skills and interests.

Why is keyword research important?

Keyword research is important for recruiters because it helps to:

• understand what people are searching for when they are looking for recruitment opportunities, and to optimize their website accordingly.
• identify the specific needs and pain points of their target audience, which can inform the content they create and services they offer, ultimately leading to more conversion and better candidate experience.
• identify the competition in the local area and understand what they are doing, so they can create a more effective SEO strategy.

What keywords are best to target?

Understand that there’s no “best” keywords, just those that are highly searched by your audience. With this in mind, it’s up to you to craft a strategy that will help you rank pages and drive traffic.

The best keywords for your SEO strategy will take into account relevance, authority, and volume. You want to find highly searched keywords that you can reasonably compete for based on:

• The level of competition you’re up against.
• Your ability to produce content that exceeds in quality what’s currently ranking.

How to do keyword research for your recruitment agency

To start keyword research: put yourself in your customers shoes.

What words, phrases and terms might they use in order to find solutions to these problems? These are the keywords you want to find and target.

Here is a simple process to follow:

Step 1) Make a list of broad topics

Create a list of general topics related to your business. These might correspond to product categories, services or anything you believe your target audience would be interested in.

For example, broad topics like:

• Job Market Trends
• Employee Benefits and Perks
• Talent Acquisition Strategies
• Diversity and Inclusion in Recruitment
• Recruiting for Remote Positions

Step 2) Expand topics into a list of phrases

Now you want to take those topics and expand them into a list of related phrases to target.

Imagine yourself as a buyer looking for your product or service and ask yourself: what would I type into Google?

Whilst keyword research tools are useful here, you can do this for free by Googling your keyword.

For example, Google “job interview tips” and you’ll get a list of related questions people ask (which you can answer with blog content)

As well as related searches which may uncover other keywords to target:

Step 3) Analyze your keywords

Once you have a list of potential keywords, you need to gauge which terms are worth targeting.

You’ll need to use a keyword research tool here to pay attention to the following keyword metrics:

• Search volume
• Trends
• Search value over time
• Difficulty
• CPC
• SERP features

But most importantly, you want to consider relevancy and search intent:

Relevant keywords:

For relevancy, you want to ask yourself:

• Are these keywords relevant to my business?
• Do I have a chance of ranking for these terms based on the competition?
• Is ranking for these keywords going to have a positive ROI?

If you can answer YES to the above questions, chances are you have picked a relevant keyword

Search intent:

Search intent is the goal and purpose of a search query in Google. When someone searches for something, they are typically looking for more information before performing an action.

Search intent falls in four buckets:

• Informational – Searchers looking for information, they’ll use words like: how, what, why, when etc.
• Navigational – Searchers trying to find a specific site, they’ll use words relating to the service/product/brand
• Transactional – Searchers looking to purchase, they’ll use words like: buy, cost, pricing, cheap etc.
• Commercial investigation – Searchers researching prior to making a purchase, they’ll use words like: best, review, comparison etc

Not only is it important to select good keywords, but also to pick keywords you have a chance of ranking for.

For example, if you want to rank for the keyword “Interview Preparation Checklist” but your page doesn’t include a checklist, you’re not fully meeting the searcher’s intent and may struggle to rank for it.

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What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO describes specific elements of the pages on your website that you control, such as:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Header tags
• Internal linking
• Images
• Content

Why is on-page SEO important?

On-page SEO is essential for recruiters because it helps ensure that your recruitment website is easily found and understood by search engines, ultimately increasing visibility and driving more traffic to your job listings and career pages. This can lead to attracting more qualified candidates.

For example, if your recruitment agency specializes in “remote software developer jobs” but this term is not mentioned or emphasized on your website, it will be less likely for your site to appear in search results when job seekers search for “remote software developer jobs” or similar phrases. However, if you optimize your website by including “remote software developer jobs” as a target keyword, your site will be more likely to rank higher in search results and attract candidates searching for those opportunities.

In addition to improving visibility, on-page optimization can also enhance the overall user experience of your site, leading to higher engagement and better conversion rates. For example, having a well-organized, easy-to-navigate website with clear calls to action like “Apply Now” or “Join Our Team” will increase the chances of converting visitors into applicants.

On-Page SEO Checklist

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What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO refers to specific actions done outside of your website, such as getting backlinks from other websites or social media.

What is link building?

Link building is the practice of building one-way hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to a website with the goal of improving SEO. Common link building strategies include content marketing, building useful tools, email outreach, broken link building and guest posts.

Why is link building important?

Link building is important for recruiters because it helps to increase the visibility of a website on search engines. Google, for example, use links to a website as a way to determine the authority and trustworthiness of a website.

The more high-quality links that point to a website, the more likely it is to be considered an authority in its field and be given higher rankings in the SERPs (search engine results page).

This increased visibility can drive more traffic to a website, which can lead to more job applicants for the recruitment agency.

Link building is important for recruiters because it helps establish your recruitment agency or company as a reputable and trustworthy source for job opportunities, which can be a key factor in attracting top-tier candidates. High-quality links from reputable websites in the recruitment or industry sectors can signal to job seekers that your agency or company is respected and reliable.

Link building can also drive referral traffic to your website, where visitors are directed from other reputable sources. This can help increase brand awareness and extend your reach to new potential candidates who may not have otherwise discovered your job listings or company.

In summary, link building is crucial for recruiters as it helps improve visibility, build reputation and trust, and drive more referral traffic to your website, which can lead to more qualified job applicants.

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Recruiter SEO Best Practices (+ 4 Tips)

4 Actionable Recruitment SEO Tips

Here are some things your agency can do to begin the process of developing a good recruitment marketing strategy.

1. Add relevant keywords
2. Optimize for local searches
3. Start blogging
4. Earn links

1. Add relevant keywords to your website

People looking for job opportunities often search for specific roles, industries, or locations. Long-tail searches typically have fewer searches but attract highly targeted traffic, making it more likely to convert into qualified candidates.

For example, instead of just optimizing your recruitment website for broad terms like “jobs” or “careers,” you could target more specific keywords like “marketing jobs in [your city]” or “remote software developer positions” or “entry-level HR roles in [your area].” By focusing on these long-tail keywords, you can attract candidates who are actively searching for opportunities that match their specific needs, making them more likely to apply.

2. Optimize your site for local searches

If your SEO plan doesn’t use local SEO to target specific areas, you’ll likely miss out on some great leads. Adding the name of your town and nearby towns to your website copy is the easiest way to get better results.

But don’t forget about things on your site besides writing copy. You should also add places to the titles and URLs of your pages.

Also, make sure that your business is listed on Google Maps and local directory sites. This will help your business show up more in local searches.

3. Start writing useful content

The main goal of recruiter agency SEO is to get more candidates by making your website more visible in Google.

One way to do this is by maintaining a blog. If you write a blog with tips on job search strategies, interview preparation, or career development, you’ll start attracting interested readers and potential candidates.

As your traffic grows, so will your search rankings, and job seekers looking for opportunities in your industry will turn to you as a reliable source for job listings and career advice. By providing valuable content, you can build your reputation as an authority in recruitment, ultimately attracting more qualified candidates to your agency.

4. Earn quality links

How high your site ranks in search results for keywords and phrases related to your business depends on how many and how good the links are to it. This means that you need to get good links if you want to keep your rankings.

You can do this by making good content and reaching out to bloggers and leaders in your field to ask them to share it. This will not only help you move up in search results, but it will also make your recruitment agency look like a leader in the field.

Backlinks are a very important part of SEO for recruiters. They are like a vote of confidence for the content you put out. Because of this, links are one of the most important ways that search engines like Google decide how to rank pages.

How does recruitment SEO work?

SEO for recruiters means making sure that your website is optimized for both search engines and users. This makes your website more visible in relevant and organic search results.

Optimizations include:

• on-page SEO
• link building
• technical SEO review
• content audit
• local citation audit

Why do recruitment agencies need marketing?

It helps you set your agency apart.

Your candidates are your customers. A marketing plan not only helps you identify your target audience but also helps potential candidates understand why they should choose your recruitment agency over others.

A strong recruitment marketing strategy should attract new candidates, retain the ones you have, and raise awareness of your job opportunities. The main goal is to get potential candidates to apply for roles, reach out for more information, or schedule interviews with your agency. Effective marketing helps build your reputation, making your agency the go-to source for top talent.

How long does recruitment SEO take?

Typically, recruiter SEO takes at least six months to deliver results.

In some cases, recruitment offices may start to see results like increased traffic, phone calls, and appointments, in faster time frame than this.

Although typically 6 months is a good benchmark as SEO is a long-term strategy vs. a short-term strategy like PPC.

How much does SEO for recruitment agencies cost?

Prices for recruiter website SEO depend on multiple factors, but the average cost for recruitment SEO is $1500 – $5000 per month.

If you’re looking to partner with a consultant or recruitment SEO expert, the average rate is $100 – $300 per hour.