10 Steps to SEO for Recruiters

Being specialists in online recruitment, we have created a 10-step guide for recruiters looking to improve their search engine positioning. SEO is a constantly evolving process and you will need to put resources behind it to make it successful.

Step 1: Define objectives

Define your search engine positioning and marketing objectives: What do you want to achieve in terms of quality candidates visiting your site? What do you want to achieve around potential clients visiting your site?

Establish specific goals and how to measure them. Is it numbers of jobseekers visiting your site per month? Is it getting on the first page of Google with particular relevant terms?

Step 2: Collect feedback & Monitor

Once you know what you want to achieve and how to measure it, use the tools available to capture these metrics automatically.

There are a number of web analytics tools to measure the performance of your SEO efforts. Google Analytics is just one example, and it is free. Choosing a good tool and setting it up will ensure your work is achieving a solid return on investment and effort in this new field.

Step 3: Research your relevant keywords and key phrases

What are the words and phrases that your future clients will type into a search engine to find you or a service like yours? Make a list of these, these are your potential “keywords.”

Tip: explore your recruitment niche by typing in some keywords into a search engine, discovering who ranks highly and trawl their site for other potential key words and phrases.

Check your list these with a tool like the Google Keyword tool: (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). By searching your industry, generic product or service, or other words related to your product, you can find which words are popular for people searching for products and services like yours.

Then you can test these keywords using Pay Per Click products such as Google Adwords to find your profitable keywords.

Step 4: Site architecture

Your keyword research will define your site architecture. You need to define carefully the structure of the site to make it SEO-friendly.

Create silos to define your content flow and make sure internal links (between silos) only link to top pages. Consider using breadcrumbs to help search engines understand your site structure.

Step 5: On-page optimisation

Based on your selected keywords and key phrases, make sure you categorize each of your web pages appropriately. Make your meta-tags keyword rich and readable, as this will help search engines understand the context of your content. The main meta-tags are:

  Title

  Description

When the search engine understands your content properly, it will utilize it for creating your ranking best.

NB: Keywords are a meta-tag that used to be considered by Google, but they are no longer being used to determine your page ranking.

Step 6: Site submission & distribution

You can submit your site directly to the main search engines, such as Google and Yahoo.

You can also use public directories, which is an important step in successful SEO activities because:

You will receive a lot of derivative links to other directories

We recommend DMOZ (Open directory project dmoz.org) and Yahoo! Directory (although this one is not free).

For media heavy sites that use podcasts and videos extensively, it is worth exploring specific rich-media distribution mechanisms to make sure your content has the ideal type of exposure and hence traffic generation impact.

Step 7: External links

Obtaining links from other websites pointing to your website is a great way to start generating traffic instantly. Link exchange serves two purposes. First, it brings actual visitors to your web pages, i.e. creates traffic. Second, if done properly it positively affects your website search engine rankings.

How do you exchange links?

Step 8: Content creation & distribution

The most effective and most dependable way to increase the amount of traffic to your website is to offer more quality content. You can offer:

  Relevant articles

  Press releases

  Newsletters

Search engines also place great importance on quality and relevant content. Ideally, you will have content produced internally, but there are many outsourcing options available. Consider rich-media content such as podcasting and video if possible. Avoid duplicate content.

Step 9: Social media

Creating social media profiles is easy and usually free. However, you need to make sure you put the effort in making these profiles reach their potential. Otherwise it is like having a telephone handset unplugged from the telephone network. There are many options for social networking available for recruiters, the most popular ones being:

  FaceBook

  Twitter

  LinkedIn

Make sure you link your job posting accounts to Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook.

Step 10: Analyse and improve

Check Google Analytics to measure the work you are doing with SEO. Do relevant searches in the common search engines; develop a sense of your own positioning in the search engines. Understand what is working and what is not and take action to reach your goals. This is an ongoing process and certainly a learning journey. Embrace it and enjoy the process!

Corporate

Focused on the recruitment process requirements of businesses that need to source their own candidates or that use one or multiple recruitment agencies to acquire talent.

Intelligent
High volume capacity
Flexible workflow module

Learn more

Agency

Sophisticated semantic matching engine to analyse resumes and rank them against the vacancy criteria, thus producing accurate recommendations more quickly and effectively.

Comprehensive
Extensive
Powerful

Learn more

Download Our Corporate HR Whitepaper (PDF, 1.0Mb)

Download Our Agency Whitepaper (PDF, 1.0Mb)