Recruitment SEO has a complication no other category shares: you are selling to two audiences whose searches barely overlap. Candidates search for job titles, salaries and locations. Employers search for staffing partners in a sector or a region. The same website has to serve both, and most agency proposals quietly optimise for the first because it produces bigger traffic numbers, while the revenue sits with the second. A recruitment firm that buys search work without separating those two objectives will end up with an impressive chart and the same number of client conversations it had before. This page sets out how each side works, what the technical layer actually requires, and what to ask an agency before signing.
The candidate side is a structured data problem first
Job listings are one of the few areas of search where a specific technical implementation produces a direct, visible result. Google's documentation on job posting structured data explains the properties a listing needs, including the title, description, hiring organisation, location and posting dates, so that the page becomes eligible to appear in the job search experience. It also sets out expectations that catch agencies out: each listing needs its own indexable page, expired postings should be removed or marked as such, and the markup must match what is visible to a user. That maintenance requirement is the part most firms underestimate, because a board full of stale roles damages trust with candidates and quality signals alike. Beyond the markup, candidate visibility comes from pages built around how people actually search, which is job title plus location, plus salary and career questions in your sectors. Those pages should say something your applicant tracking system's default templates do not, which is where a recruiter's actual market knowledge earns its place.
The employer side is where the revenue is
Employers search differently. They look for a staffing or recruitment partner in a sector, in a city, for a type of hire, often adding words like contract, executive, temporary or a specific credential. Those queries are lower volume, considerably more valuable, and usually neglected in favour of candidate traffic. Winning them takes a small number of substantive pages: one for each sector you genuinely serve, one for each type of engagement you run, each explaining how you work, what your process is, how you are paid, and what a client should expect in terms of time to shortlist. Evidence matters more here than anywhere else on the site: named sectors, real placement examples told properly, and the practical detail that shows you have done this before. This is the part of the programme a firm buying digital marketing and SEO services should insist is scoped and reported separately from candidate traffic, because otherwise it will be crowded out by the metric that grows faster.
The traps specific to recruitment sites
Three recur. First, job board duplication: aggregating or syndicating the same listings that appear on dozens of other sites produces pages with nothing unique about them, which is precisely the sort of scaled, low value content Google's spam policies describe as problematic. If your board is largely syndicated, the value has to come from what you add around it. Second, expired listings: leaving thousands of filled roles live to keep the page count high frustrates candidates and creates a large body of pages nobody wants. Handle expiry deliberately, whether by removing, redirecting or clearly marking closed roles. Third, thin location pages: a page for every town in the country with a job title swapped in is a familiar tactic and a poor one. Build location pages only where you actually recruit and can say something specific about that market. An agency that proposes any of these three as the core of the strategy is optimising for the size of the deliverable rather than for your pipeline.
What to ask an agency, and how to judge the work
Ask candidates to state, in the proposal, how the budget splits between candidate visibility and client acquisition, and what each half will produce. Ask who writes the sector pages, because those need somebody who understands the market rather than a generalist working from a keyword brief, and the usual workable answer is that the agency interviews your recruiters. Ask how job posting markup and expiry will be handled given your applicant tracking system, because that answer reveals quickly whether they have done this before or are about to learn on your account. Then the standard commercial checks: the disclosed minimum engagement, what is subcontracted, and who owns the analytics and Search Console properties at the end, which should be you. For measurement, split the reporting from day one. Candidate applications by source, and client enquiries by source, tracked separately. A single blended traffic figure is the mechanism by which a recruitment programme looks successful for a year while the client side never moves.
Questions people ask about recruitment seo
Should our job listings live on our own site or only on job boards?
Both, with the canonical version on your own site so that the listing can be marked up properly and appear in search on its own merits. Boards bring reach and volume; your own indexable pages bring candidates who found you rather than a listing among hundreds, and they build the sector visibility that also matters to employers.
How do we get found by employers rather than candidates?
Build pages aimed at what a hiring manager types, which is usually a sector plus a location plus a type of engagement, and put substance in them: your process, your fee model, your typical time to shortlist, real examples. Then report client enquiries separately from applications so nobody can present candidate traffic as commercial progress.
Do expired job postings hurt the site?
Leaving large numbers of filled roles live is bad for candidates and creates a lot of pages that serve no one, and Google's job posting documentation is explicit that expired postings should be removed or marked as no longer accepting applications. Agree a rule with your agency and automate it against your applicant tracking system rather than handling it by hand.
How long does recruitment SEO take to work?
Job listing visibility can appear quickly once the markup and indexing are right, which makes it the fastest win in the category. Employer side visibility behaves like any competitive commercial search work and takes months. Judge the two on separate timelines, and watch pages shipped and impressions on client side queries from the first month.