A recruitment agency's website has two audiences with opposite interests reading the same pages. Employers want evidence you can fill a role and a sense of what it costs; candidates want jobs, salary information and discretion. On top of that sits a job listings feed that generates and destroys hundreds of pages a month, which is the largest technical fact about the site and the one most rarely managed.
The job listings are the biggest part of the search surface
Live vacancies create pages that appear and disappear constantly, and how the site handles a filled role, whether it redirects, returns an error or lingers, decides a great deal about how the site is crawled. Decide the policy explicitly: expired roles either redirect to the relevant category or return a proper gone status, never a soft error page. Job posting structured data is also worth implementing properly, because it is one of the few places a small site can appear in a rich result.
Separate the client side from the candidate side
Employers looking for a recruiter and candidates looking for work should land in different sections with different navigation, different content and different calls to action. Sites that blend them produce pages that persuade neither, and the client-facing side is nearly always the thinner of the two because it earns no traffic from job searches. If the fee-paying audience is employers, that section deserves the greater share of the writing.
Specialism is the only defensible organic position
Generic recruitment terms are contested by national job boards with overwhelming authority, and no agency site will outrank them. What is winnable is the intersection of a specific discipline, a specific seniority and a specific place: the vertical you actually place in, described with the vocabulary that trade uses. An agency that cannot name its specialism cannot be ranked for anything except its own brand.
Salary and market content earns links and trust in both directions
Salary guides, market updates and hiring process content are read by employers deciding what to offer and by candidates deciding whether to move, and they are the most linked-to material a recruitment agency can publish. Base them on your own placement data where you can, with the period and the sample stated, because the version drawn from your own desk is the one nobody else can copy.
Candidate privacy and job advertising rules apply to the content
Job advertisements are subject to equal opportunity requirements and, increasingly, to state and local pay transparency rules that require a salary range in the posting for certain jurisdictions. Those rules are about the advertisement itself, which means they apply to the pages your marketing produces. Check the requirements for the places you advertise into and build them into the posting template rather than leaving them to each consultant.
Questions people ask about SEO for recruiters
Can a recruitment agency outrank the job boards?
Not for generic role and location searches, where the boards have both scale and authority. For a specific discipline at a specific seniority in a specific market, yes, frequently, because that combination is too narrow for the boards to serve well and is exactly where a specialist agency's own content is better.
Should we publish salary information?
Yes, and increasingly you may be required to in certain jurisdictions for the roles themselves. Beyond compliance, salary content is the most reliably read and linked material in this sector, and a guide built from your own placement data rather than a national survey is something no competitor can replicate.
What happens to a job page when the role is filled?
It should redirect to the relevant discipline or location category, or return a proper gone status, rather than becoming a page that says this role is no longer available. Thousands of those accumulate into a large surface of pages nobody wants, which is bad for crawling and worse for a candidate who lands on one.
Should the client and candidate sides be separate websites?
Usually not, because the authority is better concentrated in one domain and the job content helps the whole site. Separate sections with distinct navigation and distinct content achieve the separation without splitting the domain. Two sites doubles the maintenance and halves the authority.