How to build a recruitment website:
SEO and marketing principles 

What does a good recruitment website look like, and how should it be maintained? Company websites are an organisation’s shopfront and can make all the difference between attracting or repelling customers. Successful maintenance is a full-time job that Reed Franchise Partnerships well understand – so let's see what’s involved...

Website ownership for recruiters is a must – you need a platform to showcase your jobs, and your expertise, and it can really pay off. But in a vast worldwide web of recruiters competing for the same candidates and clients, you can soon be left behind if you don’t understand the basic principles of website maintenance and marketing.

So, what are the foundations of a good recruitment site that will lead to professionals and employers choosing you over a sea of bigger, fancier fish? It’s all too easy to fill a homepage – the website’s ‘shopfront’ – with information that distracts the viewer from what they want to know, which in recruitment is usually the quickest way for them to search for jobs and find someone able to help with their hiring needs.

Creating your website strategy

It’s important to have a basic strategy for your website.

Let’s start by understanding how Google and other search engines work. When you search for anything on Google it does not instantly search every single live website for you in a split second. Instead, it sends out ‘crawlers’ to trawl websites for relevant information, filing it on the server – think of this as a library index. So, when you are running searches, Google checks the index, not all live websites.

How often are websites scanned? This depends on how popular those websites are, how often they are updated and how genuine they are. Crawling can occur every few hours to up to 30 days, which is why updating your website on a regular basis is crucial – to encourage Google to crawl your website more often and encourage more visitors. Otherwise, it could take days for Google to index your latest job adverts and start displaying them on the search engine results page.

What is SEO?

One of the first terms to understand when planning content is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as ‘organic’ results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.

SEO is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance, positioning, and usefulness of multiple types of content in the organic search results. This content can include web pages, video media, images, local business listings, and other assets. Because organic search is the top method via which people discover and access online content, utilising SEO best practices is essential for ensuring that the digital content you publish can be found and chosen by the public, increasing your website’s organic traffic (visitors).

Strong SEO can lower the cost of Google Search adverts you might wish to use in the future. Google does what it can to reward attractive and relevant pages as it helps the overall user experience –serving users with the most relevant results.

How do search engines use SEO?

Search engines use SEO to improve the visibility and ranking of websites on search engine results pages. It involves various tactics and disciplines such as research, analysis, design, marketing, and content production with the aim of generating more website traffic and sales – it does this by answering the key questions of visitors and search engine crawlers (bots that search and index website content). SEO depends on the algorithms of different search engines, which often change over time.

SEO works by demonstrating to search engines that your content is the best result for the topic at hand. This is because all search engines have the same goal: to show the best, most relevant results to their users.

You can perform simple SEO yourself by identifying missing site- or page meta titles, which are often found as ‘summary’ blocks in the back-end editing area of your site, and these simply need filling out with keywords pertinent to your product and search.

If you want to learn more about SEO, you can check out Google’s ‘Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide’ which provides an overview of how SEO works and tips on how to improve your website’s ranking on Google.

Understanding website algorithms

People often think that when they create a job advert it will automatically appear at the top of the search results. Firstly, if that was the case, everybody would be following it so whose job would be placed at the top? Secondly, the Google algorithm is a heavily guarded industry secret. We are only made aware of some key ranking factors, which are constantly revised.

When a great deal of time is spent on producing engaging content, make sure Google can see it. Correct use of HTML headings (defined by <h1> to <h6> tags) makes it easier for Google to find and read your content and improves ranking by following best practice.

Ensure that all pages are populated with meta descriptions (this will be displayed as the page description on the search results page).

Website algorithms for recruitment can have different functions, such as sourcing, filtering, or matching candidates to jobs. They use data from online sources, such as resumes, social media, or public databases, to analyse the skills, qualifications, and preferences of potential candidates. They can also use predictive analytics to estimate the future performance of employees in their new companies. However, website algorithms can also introduce bias in the hiring process, such as discrimination, unfairness, or inaccuracies.

Understanding technical language

There’s plenty of techy jargon to learn when planning a website – here are some common phrases to familiarise yourself with:

Website management tools and tricks

• Ensure that your website is populated with recent jobs.
• Ensure the content is tailored towards the audience.
• Ensure that the hosting platform and your website are designed with the latest SEO best practice in mind.
• Ensure your platform is optimised for ‘job scraping’ so that jobs are displayed automatically on as many external job boards as possible.
• Ensure that you create backlinks to your website from other sources.
• Ensure your website promotes positive user experience.
• Future-proof design and site structure that allows for easy and logical navigation.
• Capable content creators/content team who understand the audience of the website and tailor the content accordingly.
• Data insights into top-performing SEO keywords and skilled content creators who can embed those into the website copy.
• Ongoing performance monitoring and regular improvement developments.
• Get a Google Business Profile account, linked to your office and website to boost discoverability and signal to Google that you are a genuine business.
• Ensure a continual flow of positive Google reviews to your website.
• Set up a Google Analytics account to monitor the performance of the website.
• Use Google Search Console account to monitor the performance of the website and identify potential flaws.
  
  

Benefits of joining our Reed Franchise Partnerships community

A sparkling website is all well and good, but it takes time and effort to generate traffic and revenue – not to mention a dedicated team to keep it running well, in terms of content and efficiency.

But there is an easier way.

Should you decide to work with Reed Franchise Partnerships, website and marketing management will be handled for you. Our marketing channels are equipped with the collateral to help capture the interest of your target audience – that's everything from blogs, thought leadership pieces, salary guides and other topical literature to help with the promotion of your business – to save you time in creating content. And you can utilise our intranet to access the operational information you’ll need when you’re starting out, freeing you up to focus on building your business, safe in the knowledge that we’re a phone call away should you require assistance.