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?

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…)

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…)