SEO For Recruitment Agencies

A recruitment agency has two search audiences that rarely overlap: candidates looking for jobs and employers looking for an agency. Job boards and aggregators dominate generic job searches, but Google's job search experience can show vacancies from an agency's own site if the structured data is right, and client searches by sector and location are often weakly contested.

Getting jobs into Google

Google reads JobPosting structured data to show vacancies in its job search experience. The data has to match the visible page, and expired roles have to go: Google's documentation says to set validThrough, return a 404 or 410, or remove the markup when a job closes. Google also supports its Indexing API for job posting pages, so new and closed roles are picked up faster than through a sitemap alone.

Many agency job boards create thousands of thin, duplicate or expired pages. Cleaning that up often improves how the rest of the site is crawled.

Winning clients is a different job

Employers search for 'recruitment agency' plus a sector, role type or town. Sector pages showing the roles you fill, salary insight and your consultants' experience rank and convert far better than a generic 'employers' page.

Candidate-facing pages should be accurate about fees: employment agencies and businesses are generally prohibited from charging work-seekers for finding them work, with limited exceptions such as some entertainment and modelling roles. The Fair Work Agency now enforces these rules in England, Scotland and Wales.