Why is SEO Important for Recruiters?

You have a strong employer brand, great company benefits and many enticing jobs to offer. Now the only thing left to do is find relevant candidates to fill them. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the key channels recruiters can use to attract great candidates to those roles.

SEO increases the visibility of your employer brand in search engines like Google. With listings higher up the search engine results pages (SERPs), you can bring more traffic to your careers website and increase the number of applications you receive.

No matter how niche or high volume your jobs are, you’re guaranteed to find your target audience in search. In fact, research shows that 88% of candidates use search engines whilst hunting for a new role. This makes SEO a vital part of your online recruitment marketing.

A solid SEO strategy will help to bring the best candidates to the most relevant pages of your site.  Plus, with greater visibility in SERPs, you’ll get thousands of eyes on your employer brand. This makes it more likely that candidates will engage with you via other channels too.

Enhance Media specialises in digital marketing for recruiters and has been providing SEO services for careers sites for over 10 years. Take a look at our case studies to see some of the exceptional results we have achieved for leading employers and job boards.

How do you use SEO for recruiting?

Carrying out SEO work on your recruitment website means making improvements in three key areas. These include the:

• Technical set up of the site
• Relevance of backlinks from third party sites
• Quality of on-page content.

The content you write for your recruitment site should not only be engaging for candidates and demonstrate industry expertise, but it should also be optimised for Google’s latest AI powered algorithms.

By addressing each of these aspects, you’ll give your site the best chance of ranking above competitors in search engines.

How to start implementing SEO in recruitment?

To start implementing SEO on your careers website, the first steps you’ll typically carry out are:

1. Keyword research – to establish the search terms your candidates are using and whether new pages and content are required to target them.
2. Technical auditing – which will assess how strong your site is in areas such as internal linking, URL structure, crawlability and site speed.
3. SEO tracking – to measure the impact of the site improvements you make with your SEO.
4. On-page content and metadata – to optimise things like the wording, imagery, title tags, meta descriptions and heading structure of key career pages.
5. Technical fixes – for the priority issues flagged in the audit, which will improve the technical health of the careers site.

What is the best SEO strategy for a recruitment website?

There is no single SEO strategy that will propel recruitment websites to the top of Google. The approach taken for your SEO will be determined by the existing site health, as well as your unique hiring objectives.

However, there are a number of SEO tactics, which are applicable to most sites in the recruitment industry. These include:

• Keyword mapping – checking your site has the correct pages in place to target your most important keywords and creating new ones if needed.
• Optimising core web vitals – addressing these technical factors that measure the user experience on your site. These have a bearing on where your pages are ranked in search engines.
• Link mining – research into the best backlinks that have been obtained by close competitors and outreach to gain a link for your own site in the same way.
• Blog posts – establishing common questions that your candidates are asking and answering these with high quality and unique blog content.
• Social sharing – making it easy and appealing for candidates to share your job postings and articles on social channels such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Schema mark up – adding code to pages to help search engines understand the content and display it in a richer format for key Google searches. For example, implementing JobPosting schema on job details pages, to optimse your site for Google’s integrated jobs portal – Google for Jobs.

How do you optimise your SEO strategy for attracting and sourcing top talent?

To increase the performance of a recruitment website through SEO, you should first focus on your keywords. Understanding how your candidates are searching for roles is vital to sourcing the best talent.

Once you have a list of key terms to target, it’s time to optimise your recruitment site. The crucial areas to improve are the on-page content, technical health and backlink profile.

This means ensuring that your site content reflects your target keywords and delivers a great user experience. Plus, checking there are relevant third-party sites linking into your pages. This demonstrates to search engines the value your site is providing.

Need expert support with your career site SEO?

Our expert SEO team at Enhance Media partner with leading recruiters to realise the potential of their careers site and attract high quality candidates through search.

We’ve helped our clients to outrank the likes of Indeed and LinkedIn, get their vacancies seen by millions of candidates and delivered thousands of applications through SEO.

Find out more about our SEO and Google for Jobs services, browse our client case studies or contact our friendly team today, to tell us about your own SEO goals.