• 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.

How about these overarching example  goals:

• Gaining better, friendlier clients
• Gaining repeat candidate visits
• Getting more revenue / visitor
• Getting more applications / click
• etc etc…

There are numerous benefits of optimizing the conversion rate of your website, and it only adds to what you are already achieving through your website. For instance: Out of every 100 visits only 5 goal conversions occur. This effectively means that the website conversion rate is 5%. On the other hand it also means that 95 visitors do not perform the desired action.  Making minor changes to your website could very well increase the website’s conversion rate to 10%. Your site’s efficiency just doubled and at the same time your cost per acquisition is reduced by half.

Mentioned below are few of the benefits of conversion rate optimization:

• Increasing conversion rate will give your recruitment business more candidate applications / registrations (the most obvious one!).
• You can earn more profits than your competitors even if they get more visitors than your website. This is because you would be converting more visitors into business £s than they do.
• The increase in profit, as a direct result of conversion rate optimization, will help you make your online recruitment business more robust. The profit can be used to expand your online offerings and consolidate your online presence.
• The process of conversion rate optimization will help you to address the shortcoming(s) of your website. This will make the website more users friendly and thus enhance the overall website experience.

In short… your marketing might work brilliantly… does your site work as well?

Don’t get me wrong – no-one’s about to oust Google from the top spot, but search patterns show that when people find a site that delivers the content they’re after, they go to that site. I’ll give you an example.

I’m a cyclist, and love to spend all my hard-earned on things for bikes. At first, when I was getting used to shopping online, I went to Google and searched for what I was after. Simple pattern – people do it. But then, after a while, I found that only two websites from the Google results suited me – and they way I wanted to shop. Now, it’s very rare that I Google for bike stuff – I’ve been brought in to the brand by Wiggle and Chainreactioncycles. These are “my” new search engines. Job done for those two companies.

Back to recruitment… using that example. How many candidates search for “London Marketing Jobs” every week on Google? I’m not sure ( I wish I had that level of insight!) but what I do know is that all of the results on the first page are sites with their own job search engine… www.utalkmarketing.com – www.brandrepublic.com – www.regananddean.co.uk – www.marketingweek.co.uk – www.londonjobs.co.uk etc. You can probably see where I’m heading with this. The point is, when a candidate finds a site that delivers the search results that they want, will they move to that site’s brand and away from Google?

So what can we learn from this?

1. Let’s not get carried away – and remember that Google’s own guidelines on optimisation are healthy as standalone advice.  A good page structure and page meta are helpful in all sorts of ways – not just getting to the top in Google
2. Make sure your job search works well for people.  You’d be surprised how many internal site searches don’t deliver what people need or expect.
3. Use Aggregators.  It stands to reason that these services -
   1job.co.uk,
   trovit.co.uk,
   indeed.co.uk,
   workcircle.co.uk,
   indeed.co.uk
   … all carry lots of might – and candidates are more likely to use them as their job search engine
4. Be innovative.  Putting your jobs on Facebook?  Tweeting your jobs on Twitter?  Why not?  It’s minimal effort and these are two big search channels.
5. You may only get a few chances to grab that candidate in Google, so do keyword research and get some relevant jobs and other content on your site.

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?

The web analytics can do you a service and a dis-service at the same time.  Yes – the sites have had more hits in recent months, more registrations, CVs etc.,  but there comes a point where it’s quality that counts.  100 useless CVs are nothing but a hinderance to any recruiter.  100 good ones could be even worse… same number of jobs but more good candidates.

If visitor levels increase to the point where the recruitment company decides enough is enough – “We’ve got all our traffic now – your job is done as far as SEO is concerned” – what do we reply?

It’s simple – the same approach that print magazines, newspapers and journals have used.  Circulation (or visitor numbers) is important.

If you were a potential client wanting to find the best recruiters for the job, would you pick the site with 10 visits a day or 500 visits a day?  I know which one I’d be inclined to pick.

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.

Use the below numbers as a reference to better understand the month-compared-to-previous-month day count analytics bias to help you better explain your monthly reports:

January: 0.00%
February:  9.7% loss (or 6.5% loss during leap year)
March: 10.7% gain (6.9% gain during leap year)
April: 3.2% loss
May: 3.3% gain
June: 3.2% loss
July: 3.3% gain
August: 0.00%
September: 3.2% loss
October: 3.3% gain
November: 3.2% loss
December: 3.3% gain

Another issue is where those days in the month fall – weekdays vs weekends. On most recruitment websites, Mondays seem the busiest day in my experience. Some sites may rely greatly on those Monday job hunt blues. It stands to reason that some months have more Mondays than others. Bank Holiday Mondays also happen from time to time. The sites have massive reductions in traffic on these days in my ewxperience (although the next Tuesday becomes the surrogate Monday!).

So – March should be 10% up on February – approximately – and is the first month this year with those golden five Mondays!!!

1. Content – keep it coming and they’ll keep coming back.

If the content isn’t right then your market will let you know pronto.  A good site should have two new items a week. Less than one a week and you will endanger losing repeat visits.  Keep it fresh.

2. Know your analytics

Few visitors,  low levels of repeat visitors,  low or declining average session time, or a high bounce rate.?  See the signs!

3. Ensure that goals are prominent on the site.

How do your candidates register?  Apply? Subscribe?  Have you taken a step back and looked how easy it is?   How do your clients post jobs to your site?  If they can’t do, how can they contact you?  Will they bother clicking three times to find your phone number?

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.

Based on the type of goal(s), website conversion can be broadly classified into three:

1. Informational Conversion: This type of conversion happens when the visitor finds the information he/she is looking for. Most government websites are information based and would achieve informational conversion. Such conversions are difficult to measure, however, average time spent on the site is considered to be an apt indicator.
2. Transformational Conversion: When a visitor subscribes to a free service such as a newsletter, transformational conversion is said to have happened. When someone subscribes to our newsletter/blog/article, we deem it as transformational conversion.
3. Transactional Conversion: When an actual transaction (application, CV submission, etc) happens or the business receives (or may receive) money or services from any other activity performed by the visitors, transactional conversion happens.  On an e-commerce site. sale of product is classified as transactional conversion. A sales enquiry, for us, is considered as transactional conversion.

Have you done much for your conversion chances lately?  What are you offering your website visitors that makes their visit more meaningful?  A hit is a hit.  It’s pretty worthless without some sort of conversion.