A dedicated and regularly updated blog is a great way to demonstrate your agency’s industry knowledge, strengthen brand identity, share important news and boost traffic to your recruitment website. Over 20 billion blog pages are viewed each month – done right, blogging can seriously up your visibility and increase your lead conversion. However, many fail to see decent results from their efforts. Whether you’re just starting a blog or want to improve your current blog, these tips should help to increase ROI on your content.
Keep the content relevant
It’s tempting for a busy recruiter to pull together a quick generic blog just to post fresh content. However, if this doesn’t connect with your intended audience they won’t stay on your website and click onto another page and, ultimately, it won’t help you to convert. It also won’t help with your branding. It’s essential to meet a need or address a hot topic. For example, if you recruit within education write about the sector’s skills shortage and offer ways to address this. If you work in events recruitment, write about the way events roles have evolved as the pandemic has forced them online. Write about what your candidates and clients will find valuable.
Offer both evergreen and topical content
Posting blogs focusing on current, topical events is crucial to establish yourself as an industry thought leader and to demonstrate you’re keeping abreast of important news within your sector. However, make sure you also publish a range of evergreen blogs – content that remains relevant at all times – to ensure there’s always something interesting for visitors to read and to keep your content in the search engines. Topics such as the importance of qualifications v experience, soft v hard skills, and interview tips are timeless. Blogs that have longevity can be repurposed and will keep performing year after year.
Don’t forget to share and promote
You could write the best blog in the world but if it’s not seen it’s pretty worthless. Make sure your blog page is clear on your homepage navigation bar and consider including a link to your most recent blogs on your homepage. Also add popular/recent/related blogs on the side bar of all articles. Once a blog is published, share on your social media channels to increase your reach. If you send out a newsletter via email, include links to your most recent blogs. And make sure you pepper the blog with keywords to increase the likelihood of it being picked up in search results.
Make your blogs targeted
Whilst titles such as ‘How to ace an interview’ and ‘How to attract the perfect candidate’ might reach more people, they won’t necessarily be the sort of people you need to be attracting to your website, i.e. top talent and potential clients in the industry that you recruit for. To target your blogs you need to think of the keywords that they will be using when they search online. For example, if you recruit within the property sector you could write an article entitled ‘How to ace an interview at an estate agents’ or ‘How to attract the perfect Property Manager’. These articles may have less of a reach but they should reach those that you want to target, ultimately resulting in more leads.
Blogging can be time-consuming but the effort is worth the uptick in business. A recent survey has shown that companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month than those that don’t blog. Putting the time in to ensure those blogs are relevant, valuable and reach who you want them to reach will allow you to reap the rewards of a much increased ROI.
