How high does your recruitment firm’s website content rank on Google?
To secure high search engine ranking positions you need to produce content that is engaging, informative and offers real value to your clients and candidates. Secondly, it must also be search engine optimised so that your audiences discover it when entering relevant search queries.
Here are some key tips that recruitment marketers can use to ensure that their agency’s blogs are SEO optimised and rank higher in Google’s search results.
Improve your recruitment firm’s blog rankings with these tips:
1. Research your keyword
Keywords are the words and phrases that clients and candidates enter into Google when searching for relevant content that fulfills their queries. Therefore, it is essential that the keyword you choose is relevant to the topic of your blog if it is to rank highly on Google.
Before writing a blog on your chosen topic, you should carry out keyword research to make sure that you are using a keyword that your target audience is using to search for content related to the subject and that it isn’t so competitive that you are unable to rank highly on Google.
Two tools that I recommend using to help with your keyword research are:
Answer the Public - A free tool which enables you to see the most popular search queries for topics or brands
Google Trends – This analyses the popularity of top search queries and uses graphs to compare the search volume over time across different regions
It is also important to understand the difference between short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords:
Short-tail keywords – these consist of one or two words and relate to broad search queries
Long-tail keywords – these are usually between three to five words
Whilst it can be tempting to use short-tail keywords in your content as it can be far easier writing loosely about a broad topic, these can be extremely difficult to rank for and even if you manage to you are more likely to be attracting a generic audience to your site.
Therefore you should consider using long-tail keywords to carefully produce content targeted towards the needs of your audience. For example, if you are a marketing recruitment agency writing a blog on interview advice, you should think about what your ideal candidates are more likely to search for - ‘interview tips’ or ‘common marketing interview questions’?
2. Optimise your title tag
The title tag is what is displayed on search engine ranking pages (SERPS) as a clickable link to your blog post. The title tag is often confused with the title of your blog post (also known as the H1) – however, the H1 is only displayed on your website.
So what can you do to create a title tag that helps your blogs stand out from other recruitment firms?
Make it the right length – Depending on the device used, Google typically displays the first 60 characters of a title tag before being truncated with an ellipsis "..." added.
Communicate the benefits – It’s vital that you put yourselves in the position of your audience and adapt the title tag to something that would pique their interests and communicate the value of your content.
3. Blog length
Whilst it can be tempting to make your blogs as short as possible, especially when you have plenty of other tasks to be doing, research shows that you should be aiming for a minimum of 1,000 words to stand a chance at ranking well on Google. This is because the algorithm is placing increasing value on content that is ‘useful and relevant’ – so not only does it need to use the right keywords, but it also needs to go into a certain level of detail for Google’s algorithm to deem it useful for readers.
4. Use images and videos
Adding images or videos to your blog posts can make them far more engaging for readers than simply having blocks of text. Their inclusion can also improve the time they spend on your site which can lead to a better ranking for your content. When adding images, it is important that:
Your file name is relevant to the image – instead of a generic file name such as ‘image1.png’ it should reference what it is e.g. ‘marketing_interview.png’
You include alt-text – This is text that describes what the image contains to visually impaired users using screen readers. It also enables search engines to understand what the image is about for example ‘marketing interview taking place’.
5. Craft an engaging meta description
The meta description provides a brief summary of your blog post or web page to search engines and is often displayed by Google in its search results if it is relevant to the user’s search query. Like the title tag, it is important that you optimise this to increase clickthrough rates to your content. Google generally truncates meta descriptions to 155-160 characters so it is recommended that yours does not go beyond this length.
To create a meta description that helps drive page visits, you should focus on clearly addressing the issue or barrier that the blog post is helping the user overcome. For example, instead of ‘This blog post looks at some of the most frequently asked questions at marketing job interviews.’ you should speak directly to the user and give them a reason to click through to your blog over the many thousands of other results on the same subject e.g. ‘What are the most frequently asked questions at marketing interviews? Read our blog post and prepare yourself for the big day.’
6. Include both internal and external links
When writing blog posts you should focus on creating links to valuable sources such as related blog posts and web pages on your own site to give readers more information on similar topics as well as third-party publications.
It is recommended that you have at least two internal links to content relevant to your blog post. For example, if your blog is on ‘frequently asked questions at marketing interviews’, a related link in your call-to-action at the end of your blog could be to your marketing jobs landing page.
It has been shown that pages with outbound links outperform those without as it helps give the content relevance to Google, so an external link could be to third-party statistics you have cited which show an increase in marketing job vacancies.
