Completing the loop: What are you spending your money on?

It sounds a simple question, but how important is SEO to your recruitment website?  I honestly don’t know.  Did you expect me to?  How could I possibly know – you haven’t shown me the figures… so I can’t say.

You do have the figures… don’t you?  Don’t you?

If you’re putting any effort into marketing your recruitment company you’ll have some good idea of the cost of using various channels

• SEO
• Pay Per Click
• Social Media Optimisation
• Email Marketing
• Other online advertising or sponsorship
• Print media, newspapers, directories, Yell.com, etc etc.

… but it’s not about costs – is it.  If expenditure was about cost we’d all live in the woods under tarpaulin.   It’s about value.  What’s the value to your recruitment website of every pound you spend on any of the channels

And I’m not talking about value of a click – those are just flattery.  Surely you’re measuring your marketing in terms of a good CV or ultimately a placement.  What’s worth most to you – a click from Google on some long-tail search, or one of the 500 hits your site just sent out from its email alerts.

• What’s the best source of good CVs?
• Which keywords are generating the most placements?

If you’re asking those type of questions, you’re on the right track.  Job Aggregator Indeed.com have spruced up and modernised an old marketing phrase relating to the Four As of Advertising and in their white paper remind recruiters how they can only have true control over ROI for marketing if they think like a CFO and observer the four A’s:

1. Assign
2. Automate
3. Analyze
4. Adjust

I won’t go into it verbatim here, but I’m particularly keen on the “Automate” angle of recording marketing expenditure – and am currently helping a client to do this.  We’re looking at

• Providing full referrer information in a consultant’s application email (Source of click, keywords typed (if search) etc.)
• Providing a linkback to the Recruitment Database (in this case the FXRecruiter website also doubles as the database)
• Full custom reporting system that can pull application and referrer data from the database into easy to view graphs and spreadsheets.

Basically, it’s about filling the gap that currently exists between spending your money on marketing and getting good candidate CVs through the door and getting paid for making placements.  And recruitment is all about filling the gap – right?

Optimising Conversion rates

The importance of conversion rate optimisation is derived from the benefits that it has to offer.  It’s normal – (if simplistic) – to assume that your SEO goals for a recruitment website are to gain

• more clients
• more candidates

‘Normal’ – because the old-fashioned and still important addage of getting traffic to your site can only be a good thing – and simplistic because getting people to the site in itself doesn’t do you any good at all.  No-brainer time: It’s what they do when they get there that counts. (more…)

What is a job search engine? Beyond Google and Yahoo!

Traditional organic SEO means (to put things simply) focus on mainly Google (organic) results and, if you have time, Yahoo (organic) results. It’s no wonder – if someone wants to find something on the web, we all know where people go first – it makes sense to focus your resources there. But what happens when they discover a ‘new’ search engine? (more…)

When Candidates are in Large Supply? More SEO needed!

A chat with my colleague Dave earlier today about the effects the recession is having on SEO for Recruitment Companies.

The Apparent problem: When there’s so many more people in the market looking for jobs, haven’t we achieved our goals, and got more visitors, regsitrations, CVs (i.e. people) to their website?
(more…)

Days in the Month and website analytics

February’s just finished and it was a bad month for reporting on website progress.

That’s possibly what a lot of people may be thinking anyway. One often overlooked fluctuation factor in Month on Month analysis in Web Analytics data is simply the number of days in the month. February is a prime example where you go from 31 days in January to only 28 in February (except leap years) resulting in an apparent 9.7% loss in traffic. (more…)

Keep em coming back

If there’s one thing that keeps coming up as a source of frustration, it’s getting low visitor retention rates.  As an SEO person, you do all within your power to bring new traffic in tot he site, it seems such a shame to let it go off again!  Here’s some tips  about generating repeat visits. (more…)

Go for the goal

Websites have different goals and a single website may have more than one goal.

With recruitment websites, there are some fairly obvious goals and some not so obvious ones. Obvious may be

• Candidate Registration
• Candidate Application
• Client contacting you or posting a job
• Someone filling int he contact form

Less obvious and more subtle goals exist though.  How about signing up for a free resource – like a newsletter, subscription to your RSS feed, signing up for email alerts or SMS alerts.  All of these are ‘conversions’ of one type or another.  Some have immediate and clear ‘value’ whilst others are more subtle, but can be just as valuable in the long term. (more…)