The recruitment industry is both lucrative and highly competitive. For this reason, if you are new to this sector, you will need to utilise every advantage in order to compete against well-established companies.

Now, when it comes to digital marketing, your website should be a reliable platform that will enable you to reach out to candidates and clients. The quickest and easiest way to attract talent is to ensure that you apply search engine optimisation (SEO) to your site. 

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation will help you drive traffic to your website from the search engine results pages. In order to generate the most traffic, your site will need to appear on the first page of search engines such as Google. Unfortunately, this won’t happen overnight. It requires comprehensive planning, technical tweaking, sound content strategy and promotion. Here are some steps you should take to ensure your website is geared up for SEO success. 

How to optimise your recruitment site

Create/modify your sitemap

A sitemap is the file that provides valuable information about your pages or assets. Start-ups, and in fact even well-established recruitment companies, need to have a well-organised and appropriately optimised sitemap. Otherwise, it will be difficult to attract traffic from users and search engines.

Incorporate website copy based on your target keywords

The website content (copy) will inform visitors about your service offers and guide them through your site’s pages. Your audience should have access to the following key pages:

  • Home page
  • About Us page
  • Our Services page
  • Jobs pages

When writing your copy, you need to remember to base it on the most popular keywords as this will help ensure that the content targets a particular audience. For example, people searching for jobs may conduct either a generic search or a specific search, as explained below.

Generic search                

“Content writer jobs” – this type of phrase relates to a general job description. 

Specific search                

“Social media writer jobs” – here, the phrase refers to a job speciality. 

“Technical writer jobs” – these keywords are most likely to be used by jobseekers searching for specific specialities.

These search formats can be categorised as “keyword buckets”. This is an efficient way of organising various keywords into smaller, manageable groups. In addition, you can also prioritise which keywords will generate more traffic from candidates looking for jobs. 

To get a clearer understanding, you should visit your competitors’ websites. You will almost certainly notice that their sites are organised something like this:

  • Home page
  • Jobs/vacancies pages
  • Jobs available per industry or sector
  • Jobs available per location
  • Jobs available by classification – entry-level, part-time, full-time or qualification
  • Supporting content – career guides and salary information

Keyword planning tools 

To help you categorise the various keywords you have collected, you should use simple and effective tools such as Google Keyword Planner. You can enter any potential keywords into the planner and it will give you insights and suggestions for keywords that could be relevant to your particular field. 

Other online tools that can suggest keywords for your content writing include Organic Research and Ahrefs.

Add internal links

Internal links help users and Google crawl bots to easily travel around your website. They also help Google identify the most important pages of your site. 

By adding internal links, you can:

  • Improve the user experience 
  • Make it easier for search engines to find your pages 
  • Increase your ranking in organic searches

Categorise job pages 

By properly categorising your jobs pages, you will enhance the user experience. You can gain inspiration from your competitors’ websites and, if possible, try to improve on their approach. If successful, you will achieve a higher ranking and appear more authoritative in the eyes of search engines. Many small-sized recruitment businesses use this tactic to attract traffic and outperform their larger competitors.

Improve the SEO of your jobs pages. You must ensure that you display your recent job vacancies on the home page and internal content pages. This is a proven tactic that will help you generate more traffic and improve your conversion rates.    


Make your jobs pages more relevant and friendly to search engines. Remember to make the URL of your jobs pages more readable. For example, https://recruitment.com/jobs/management-consultant/ is easier to scan than https://recruitment.co.uk/jobs/w12i6/.

Remove any expired job vacancies

You should consider incorporating a standard operating procedure (SOP) for job vacancies that are no longer available. If you are a start-up or only run small to medium-sized operations, you can:

  • Automate the process using meta tags – you can display a message such as ‘This job is no longer available’. 
  • Redirect the job page to another page – you can help your visitors by leading them to a relevant page (e.g., the job category section).

Devise a Content Strategy

Recruiters can use a content strategy to increase their web traffic and promote their website. Without high-quality content, users may never even find your site.

A content strategy is often based on users’ actions. It requires careful analysis of your audience’s behaviour. An SEO specialist can help you identify the type of content that will be suitable for your website.  

Prioritise mobile users  

When designing your recruitment website, it is imperative that you ensure it is mobile-friendly:

  • Searching for jobs on a mobile device has now become the norm. In the US, more than one billion job searches are conducted on a mobile device.
  • Google is also following mobile-first indexing. Accordingly, it will prioritise mobile-friendly sites in its search results.

Conclusion

If you own a start-up or a small recruitment business, your website can still outrank your larger competitors on search engines such as Google. To achieve this, you will need to ensure every page is accessible to both users and search engines. If you create a well-organised sitemap and logical structure, everything will flow and slot into place. If you don’t know where to start, you should browse through your competitors’ sites and analyse how their pages and links are organised. You can then improve on the format and, wherever possible, optimise your site’s structure and content. 

You should also pay attention to your content and keywords. Recruitment SEO experts advise that users may never even see your website if it is not supported by high-quality content. It helps to incorporate back-up features and selling points relating to your business and services. Remember, it’s not all about you. Try to get inside the minds of your potential candidates. Think about how they will go about searching for a vacancy. By including the keywords frequently used in candidates’ search queries, you can ensure that your website content is optimised and perfectly suited to your target audience. 


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