SEO Guide – 4 Best Practices You Can Implement Today

The internet has become part of the modern recruitment process, whether you are trying to find a new job or finding the right hire for your organisation. When it comes to reaching your prospective hires and companies, the internet is practically limitless.

If you own a recruitment agency, it makes sense to invest resources in making your website more visible to prospective candidates and clients. One of the best ways to do that is through search engine optimisation.

Over the years, SEO has undergone immense changes, driven largely by the goal of search engines to make the internet more beneficial to users through innovations like algorithm changes and updates. This meant scrapping tools and tactics that were once deemed to be useful in favour of new ones.

But despite some of the changes in the techniques and tactics employed by SEO professionals to drive organic traffic to a website, there are a few best practices that remain effective. These remain highly useful because they put a premium on the idea of making a website relevant and helpful to users.

If you wish to drive more organic traffic to your website, here’s a brief SEO guide that you can use. The goal of this guide is to build a strong foundation for your website that you can use to increase its online visibility. You will also notice that the steps outlined are quite straightforward — you do not have to delve into too many technicalities to make things work to your advantage.

1. Selecting and using the right keywords

The whole SEO process is anchored upon choosing and using the right keywords for your campaign. For this task, there are plenty of tools that you can use but the simplest and most effective is Google’s keyword planner.

Start the process by listing down potential keywords that you think users will use in their search for a recruitment agency. The keyword planner will then give you invaluable insights about these keywords, including the monthly searches. The keyword planner can also offer suggestions about keywords that you might want to consider using. From there, you can narrow down your choices to the ones that you think will bring great response to your campaign.  It is important that you identify keywords that are very specific to your niche and not just generic “recruitment agency” terms.

2. Onsite optimisation

Onsite optimisation is one of the key factors for SEO success that you cannot ignore. Simply put, failure to optimise onsite can undermine your off site optimisation efforts. The tasks you need to perform will vary from those required for other websites. However, there are a few things that remain essential.

These include:

• Putting keywords in the URLs, title tags, meta description, header and alt tags
• Putting a unique title and description relevant to the content and theme of the page
• Avoiding the creation of pages that use essentially the same keywords
• Making your website load faster
• Making your website easy to use and navigate
• Fixing/removing broken links
• Internal linking between different pages
• Linking to authoritative and relevant websites
• Providing a good user experience

3. Creating useful and relevant content

Over the past few years, Google and other search engines have emphasised the importance of providing users with highly useful and relevant content. Publishing well-crafted and useful content helps push your recruitment website’s ranking up in search results pages. But apart from that, good content enables your website to build your company’s expertise and reputation.

Make it a habit to publish content on a consistent basis and add variety by utilising different platforms, including blog posts, videos, interviews, reports and analysis, and infographics.

4. Creating backlinks

Search engines view backlinks as a vote of confidence to your website. However, not all backlinks are created the same. Here, the old saying “quality over quantity” applies. When you are trying to get backlinks, remember that earning links from reputable and relevant websites is more valuable than simply getting a high volume of backlinks, including those from unreputable websites.

Instead of using poor quality directories and blogs, earn links by guest posting on websites that are relevant to the recruitment industry. This will help increase organic traffic to your website while helping you build authority and reach out to a bigger audience.

If you want to learn more or need help with your recruitment website’s SEO, speak to our experts and see how we can help.