Exciting News: RecWebs is becoming WaveSites!
With the Wave rebrand we will soon transition RecWebs to a new identity that better reflects Wave’s vision. New website coming soon.

The underrated SEO strategies that will boost traffic to your recruitment website

Ensuring your recruitment website follows SEO best practices is crucial but there are several underrated strategies that could raise your presence on search engines and increase organic traffic.

In a competitive market, anything that can give you that extra boost – and at no extra cost to your business – deserves to be implemented. We’ve listed our top 5 underrated SEO strategies, plus a bonus one at the end, to help you to boost your ranking.

Transcribe rich media and optimise image titles

Video, podcasts and other forms of rich media are all highly beneficial to your website. The issue is that most search engines can’t decode them. It’s therefore a good idea to transcribe videos and podcasts and add subtitles. This has the added benefit of making your website more accessible for those with sight or hearing impairments. That accessibility extends to those using a mobile device in a public place. If you don’t want the sound switched on, you need transcription. Transcribing video and audio also allows your content to be picked up by voice search, discussed in further detail below. It is essential that images have optimised, keyword-rich titles and alt tags so that Google can understand what the image is and, by extension, what the page is about.

Websites that are easy to navigate are also easier for Google to understand. And if Google understands your site, it is more likely to rank it highly. Your website’s navigation should be clear, consistent and simple. You also want to ensure that the focus pages in your navigation are those with the most engagement and that drive the highest performance. If pages deeper in your sub-menus are getting high levels of engagement and low bounce rates (which you can find out through Google Analytics), you may want to consider re-ordering your pages. What you want is for the search engine crawlers to be finding the most important pages on your website first.  

Not only does effective internal linking improve user experience, but it’s also an incredibly effective, easily implemented, SEO tactic. By inserting internal links using keyword-rich anchor text – linking from one page to another optimised page within your website – Google understands what those pages are all about. Doing that will improve your rankings, thereby increasing traffic to your website. Google will reward you – it’s one of its top three ranking factors – and you will be sending traffic to the most important pages on your website first. It’s also good practice to periodically check that none of your links are broken as this can damage SEO.

Content refresh

Just having content is not enough. The content on your website needs to be high quality and regularly refreshed to meet the increasingly sophisticated requirements of Google’s algorithms when ranking pages. Google now uses Latent Semantic Indexing, which helps the search engine to understand connections between words, ideas and pages. Keyword stuffing, clickbait titles and shallow content just won’t cut it. Content must comprehensively discuss a topic to be ranked highly. This is something that Backlinko discovered when it analysed 11.8 million Google searches and 10,000 URLs for ‘topical authority’ – the more in-depth the content, the higher the ranking. Rich answers to questions that search engine users might be asking are highly valuable. It is also crucial to ensure your content doesn’t remain static, as Google prizes regularly updated content. 

Increase page speed

Website page load speed is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the contents of a page and it can affect user experience, bounce rates and brand trust. Page speed is also vital to rankings, with Google publicly stating that it is a factor in the way its algorithm ranks pages. Google’s current recommended load time is 2 seconds and your ranking on its results pages will be affected if it is much higher than this. If it is, it’s advisable to look into ways to increase your page speed, for example reducing file sizes and optimising images.

And one additional tactic…

Optimise search for voice

This may not seem highly relevant to recruitment websites but shouldn’t be discounted as voice search is rapidly growing in popularity. The technology is in a huge number of devices – from phones, to TVs, to desktops, to smart speakers, to tablets – making it an easy, hands-free way to search. According to research by digital consultancy firm Perficient, 55% of smartphone users ask questions via voice search and global analysts Strategy Analytics found that 69% of smart speaker users ‘find out general information’ by utilising voice search. It may be used more for local searches so it’s important that your contact information is easily accessed and your Google My Business listing is updated and accurate. As voice search is generally question-based, creating detailed content that answers common questions is a good strategy. Perhaps also consider an FAQ section. Try turning a headline into a question, immediately followed by a concise but informative answer. Following that by elaborating with more detail not only optimises your content for voice search but could become a featured snippet – search engine gold dust!

These under-the-radar SEO tactics will help boost your ranking in the search engines and drive more organic traffic to your recruitment website but it is vital that you have the basic best practices in place too – research and then weave keywords into your content, ensure your website is mobile-first, measure your site’s performance using analytics, don’t forget to add metadata and focus on user experience. The better your SEO strategy, the stronger your website’s performance and the higher its ROI. 

Share this:
LinkedInFacebookTwitterEmail

One thought on “The underrated SEO strategies that will boost traffic to your recruitment website

Comments are closed.