Is SEO Worth it for Recruitment Agencies?

The simple answer is yes – SEO is important to any kind of business’ online marketing strategy. And since recruiting is all about making connections, it is especially important for any kind of talent acquisition agency–from executive search firms to temp agencies.

The main way that people find any kind of information online is through search engines. By implementing SEO strategy on all of your recruitment agency’s online content, you can influence search engines to guide candidates and clients to you.

Google is the most visited site on the internet, with 99,000 searches per second, or 8.5 billion searches a day, and up to 90% or more of pages clicked on Google come from the first page of results (SimilarWeb, 2022; Moz, 2017).

Implementing SEO strategies enables even smaller recruitment agencies to compete for a place on the first page of Google, dramatically increasing your chances of drawing the attention of potential clients and candidates to your website and social media.

One of the most important benefits of appearing on the front page of Google for your recruitment agency is organic traffic. Most searchers skip right past the paid ads on Google – in fact, over 89% of clicks on Google go to organic results, the non-paid results that appear after the ads (EndPoint Digital, 2022).

You cannot buy the top organic result on Google, but you can claim it with proper SEO – meaning even small agencies on a budget can compete with the largest and most prominent firms for a share of the millions of potential candidates and clients searching on Google every day.

But SEO is much more than a set of techniques for getting to the top of online search results. Google’s algorithm looks for what it considers to be “authoritative” content on a given subject – it wants to recommend useful and trustworthy pages to its users, because that is what its users want.

The SEO strategies that will get you to the top of Google involve building a web presence that provides useful and authoritative information to visitors to your website and social media – which will build trust and a good reputation for your agency among both clients and candidates.

Why Is SEO Especially Important For Recruitment Agencies?

No matter what field of healthcare you’re in, patients and clients are online searching for services like yours right now. Whether your practice is local or looking for a wider reach, SEO will help you reach the people you’re trained to help. Here are a few of the key ways healthcare providers can use SEO to benefit current and prospective patients and clients:

1. Online searches are one of the main ways candidates are looking for work.

Recent studies have indicated that the average job seeker spends around 30% of their time looking for a position on online search (Climber, 2022). The exact numbers for any kind of Google search are difficult to quantify, since Google doesn’t release the particulars of their search data. But even the most conservative estimates place the total number of job-related searches on Google at hundreds of millions per month (Jobiak, 2019).

With competition for candidates as intense as it is today, every recruitment firm needs a plan to harness the power of organic online search, using SEO to attract prospective candidates to your website, social media, and job listings.

2. The challenge – and opportunity – presented by a wide range of search terms.

Search terms, or keywords, are the actual words that a searcher uses when searching online. Everyone expresses themselves in their own way, and the wide variance in expression of search terms presents additional challenges–and opportunities–for recruiting firms, as few industries must account for as many potential permutations of search terms.

Even with billions of people making trillions of searches a year on Google, around 15% of all Google searches are for search terms that have never been used before – a figure that has held from 2013-2022 (Google, 2022).

When potential candidates search for information related to new positions, they have a wide variety of choices on how to express their search. For example, the searches “financial services jobs CT,” “financial management positions Fairfield county,” and “Companies looking for financial services managers in Connecticut,” may all be searches ultimately looking for the exact same thing, just expressed in very different ways.

It is important to understand how to use SEO to improve your recruitment firm’s search rank for a variety of related search terms, while also focusing on the ones that are likely to generate the best results.

Proper SEO strategy includes keyword research and management, which are methods to discover and organize the keywords that candidates and clients are searching for. Using this knowledge of keywords and SEO principles on your pages, your talent acquisition agency’s site, social media pages, and job board listings can be optimized to emphasize relevant search terms.

This will help Google recognize your online content as good matches for a variety of related queries – greatly increasing your chances of being discovered by the millions of candidates and clients searching online for services like yours.

3. SEO isn’t just for websites – it’s for social media and job board listings too.

Every recruiter with any amount of internet expertise realizes the importance of social media and job boards for online recruiting. Sites and apps like LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, and Google for Jobs are constantly growing in importance in the increasingly competitive, digital-focused recruitment industry of today. But many recruitment agencies do not realize the importance of SEO for their job listings, social media pages and posts.

The same SEO principles that will help your recruitment firm’s website rank highly on search engines will do the same for your social media and job listings – both on the search engines and within the particular site on which they’re hosted.

After all, just like Google, sites and apps like LinkedIn and Indeed want to serve their users with the best-structured, most relevant and engaging content. Implementing proper SEO principles will help your recruitment firm’s online content get more attention across all channels.

4. The benefits of website and social media working together.

Total reliance on social media and job listings has become an increasing trend over the last several years in the recruiting industry. There are many recruiters who might say something like “I get no leads through my website, all my leads come from social media. I don’t need to focus any effort on my website.”

The simple answer to that is – if you’ve put no effort into your recruitment firm’s website, especially when it comes to implementing SEO in order to rank on search engines, of course no one is finding your website.

Or if they do, it may look second-rate, unprofessional, or out-of-date, turning off potential candidates or clients before they’ve even had a chance to see what a great service you can provide for them.

In the increasingly competitive recruiting market of today, recruiters who want to gain an edge on the competition should be looking for every possible means to engage and impress potential candidates and clients.

And with the ever-increasing importance of the internet to the job-hunting and recruitment processes, this means having a complete, professional presence on all channels across the web, optimized with proper SEO in order to attract as much attention as possible.

There are many ways in which your site, social media presence, and job listings can complement one another. Two major examples are:

By linking your site’s content with your social media pages, posts, and job listings, and vice versa.

Linking your online channels is part of the SEO process, and it will provide benefits to search rank across all of them. It will also help guide potential candidates and clients to engage with more of your online content, greatly increasing your impressions on your prospects and further increasing your rankings at the same time – an upward spiral for your recruitment agency’s online reach, authority and engagement.

Leveraging the power of combined analytics.

Another way that implementing SEO on your site and your socials can benefit your recruiting firm is the power of combined analytics. Whether you choose to master SEO on your own or hire a professional to help, the tools and techniques involved become even more powerful when analyzing data from multiple sources. You’ll be able to easily identify which channels and what kinds of content are producing the best results, and you’ll gain valuable insights on how to attract more candidates and clients going forward.