A recruitment business sells to employers and recruits from candidates, and both audiences search. Candidate queries are enormous in volume, dominated by the large job boards, and produce no revenue directly. Client queries are small, valuable and competitive with every other agency in the sector. A single site has to serve both without letting the candidate content, which is far larger, bury the pages that bring in business.
Job listings need structured data and honest expiry
Individual job pages can appear in dedicated job experiences in search results, and doing so requires correct structured data, a stable URL per role, and removal or marking as expired when the role closes. Stale listings are the most common failure: they irritate candidates, damage trust and can result in exclusion from those surfaces. Automate the expiry rather than relying on a consultant to remember.
Do not try to outrank the job boards on generic roles
Broad role-plus-city queries are dominated by aggregators with enormous authority and complete inventory. The realistic candidate strategy is specificity: niche skill combinations, specialist certifications, industries and locations where you genuinely have volume, plus your own brand. Chasing the head terms produces expensive content that ranks nowhere.
Client-facing pages are a separate section, not a blog post
Employers search for a recruiter by sector, by seniority and by model: contingent, retained, contract, embedded. Each deserves a proper page explaining how you work, what it costs, your process and evidence of placements in that area. These pages are small in volume and are where the revenue is, so they should not be maintained less carefully than the job feed.
Salary and market data is the content that earns links
You hold placement data nobody else has. Published salary guides, time-to-hire figures and market commentary by sector, with a stated method and a date, attract links from employers and press in a way that generic hiring advice never does. It is also the material that makes the client-facing pages credible rather than assertive.
Questions people ask about recruitment SEO
Should jobs sit on our own domain or a job board?
Both, usually: your own domain for the search surfaces and for building your brand, boards for reach. What matters is that your own listings are technically correct and expire on time, since a feed of dead roles is worse than not publishing them at all.
How do we stop job pages swamping the site?
Keep them in their own section with sensible internal linking, ensure client-facing service pages are reachable from the top navigation, and make sure expired roles are removed from the sitemap. A site where thousands of transient pages outnumber the commercial ones needs deliberate architecture.
Is content marketing worth it for recruiters?
Where it draws on your own data, yes. Generic hiring advice is written by every agency and ranks for nobody. Salary benchmarks, market reports and sector-specific analysis based on your placements are the versions that earn attention and links.
What about candidate reviews and employer branding?
Candidates check reviews of the agency as well as the employer, and those results appear beside your brand. Treat review response as part of the program, and recognize that the fastest way to improve them is usually to fix the candidate experience rather than the marketing.