SEO isn’t difficult, but you do need to stay on your toes when it comes to SEO best practice.
There are a few traps that are easy to fall into with your recruitment website and they could have a fairly big impact on the results you get from your website.
But the good news is, just being aware of these pitfalls are half the battle, and they’re all pretty easy to fix!
Here’s 7 SEO mistakes you’re probably making – and how to fix them ASAP.
1. Not optimising for local search
If you’re recruiting and operating in a particular location, optimising your website content for that region will have a really positive impact on your SEO. Another reason why focussing on a narrow recruitment niche pays off!
If you ignore local search and go for more generic keywords in your SEO strategy, this will mean you’re competing with so many other agencies that your website will get pushed to the bottom of search results.
So start adding in localised keywords to your website copy - setting up a Google My Business is a brilliant place to start.
2. Using generic anchor texts
Anchor texts are the words you hyperlink when you’re linking out to other pages.
There’s a real tendency for marketers to use generic words like ‘click here’ or ‘this page’ to make it as clear as possible what you want someone to do, but these words will actually harm your SEO.
The reason generic anchor texts don’t work is that they have no value – they don’t tell search engine crawlers anything about the page you’re linking to, so they look like spam.
3. Using generic keywords
Focussing on more generic or global keywords is damaging to your SEO in two ways:
- It pulls in irrelevant traffic that will never convert (e.g. why pull in candidates from America when your roles are all UK-based?)
- Generic keywords are too competitive so you’ll be wasting your efforts.
Focus on attracting the traffic you actually want by using specific, long-tail keywords that speak directly to your target market.
The more niche you’re able to go, the easier it will be to outrank bigger businesses without having to spend any money on recruitment PPC ads.
4. Publishing content that’s not useful
Writing content that has no real value to your audience candidates (or whoever your target market is for that matter) is one of the most common crimes in the recruitment industry.
Look through your blog and web pages and ask yourself:
What’s in it for our readers?
What challenges are we addressing with this content?
Does the content answer questions that our target market are likely to search for on a search engine?
Because that’s what will get you those SEO clicks!
5. Making your job pages unreadable to Google for Jobs
For Google to be able to recognise your jobs pages and pull them into Google for Jobs, they need to be structured correctly with the right Google job-posting schema.
Your jobs won’t just automatically appear in Google for Jobs – you need to add structured data to help Google identify your jobs pages or use a recruitment software that does it for you.
If your jobs aren’t appearing on Google for Jobs, you’ll be missing out on millions of candidates who use Google every day for job hunting.
6. Duplicating content
It can be tempting to copy and paste paragraphs of text from one page to another on your website (or worse, take content from another website altogether!). But it’s important to know that this doesn’t fly with search engines.
Google’s crawlers are extremely sophisticated and they can pick up on duplicate content instantly. If you do any copy/pasting on your website, Google will push the original content up and push your duplicate content right down in search results.
It’s also just shady practice taking content from someone else’s website, but believe it or not people do still do it – and they almost always get caught.
So in short: Just don’t do it!
7. Not using a tool to track SEO
Using an SEO monitoring tool that will run site audits and highlight any errors is really important for SEO maintenance. Otherwise, how will you identify an issues lurking on your recruitment website.
Tools like Moz, SERanking and SEMrush will tell you if you have anything going on that will affect your ranking. SEO is a continuous project – not an on-off fix – so it’s something you’d want to invest in.
A good SEO tool will cost you about £40/month or you can combine a few different free SEO tools to get the full package.
New to SEO? The eBook below has everything you need to know to start using SEO to reach more candidates.
