Nicole Clarke: And we're live. Hello everyone. And thank you for joining us. I apologize if my video is black, I'm actually remote. I'm working from another area now. We're very excited to join you here today for the Shazamme Recruitment Website master class. We will be looking at everything. Recruitment website strategy and how you can really maximize the opportunity with your SEO and online search.

Nicole Clarke: I'm Nicole Clark and I'm joined by Rick. Rick Mare introduced himself shortly. We've been working in this space now for 14 plus years and very passionate about helping the industry be more successful at recruitment marketing and sharing a lot of tips and strategies on how you can get. 

Rick Mare: Great. Thank you, Nicola and great to be here.

Rick Mare: I'm presenting at the World Staffing Summit as Shazamme. As Nicole said, we've been doing this for a very long time, roughly 14 years, and today we hope to share some tips and tricks. Deeper into some of the things that often get overlooked. So hopefully you'll enjoy it. And please do feel free to ask any questions.

Rick Mare: So we'll start now. So today's agenda is going to be covering a lot of items. So we haven't listed here, the items that, that sort of we're going to go through, but the key takeaways that we hope you will walk away with is how SEO for recruitment sites actually work compared to the rest of the. Some key facts.

Rick Mare: The other thing which we'll focus a fair bit on will be the tools to use, to actually see how your recruitment website and your digital brand is actually performing online. So obviously there are some known tools, but there's also some other ones that we'll recommend some tips and tricks for a precio and also some insights for what to look out for in 2022.

Rick Mare: So let's start.

Nicole Clarke: So focus here is on how do you make it big online now online, we're talking about your digital strategy and the foundation being your website. And when we look at SEO, there are so many pieces to it. It is very diverse. There's a lot of things you've got to get your head around to be coming up in Google and the search engines.

Nicole Clarke: And we're going to talk about today, building your brand online. And from the ground up, you know, things you need to be thinking about that will make you more successful online. 

Rick Mare: Yeah. Thank you for that. It's very important that we start looking at what we really call is the foundation. Good. As Nicole said, there are lots of pieces to the puzzle and we've over the past 14 years really built a recipe that we know.

Rick Mare: Very much to letter the degrees. The degree of success will be very high. So please do sort of take some of these points on board because today, when we look at many recruitment sites across the globe, but which we do on a daily basis, there are still many brands. Some massive brands that still don't follow the basics that we're going to have here today.

Rick Mare: So let's start with the only approach that we see to succeed is starting with the right site architecture and content. Now, during this presentation, we will share a lot of that with you. So this is really just the overall approach and we'll go into more detail as we go through the presentation. So site architecture and content.

Rick Mare: Absolutely. If you get that. Everything else from there will become a lot easier if you don't get your site architecture, right? It's a bit like the foundation of a house. If you build a house without a foundation, it's going to crumble, same with websites. It is ultimately the most important part. Now with staffing and recruitment, obviously having a job board to display your jobs and search results and application pages are very important.

Rick Mare: So that. Our opinion, the second, most important one. Now the third one is your metadata. So all of the data that connects everything to search engines and Google, so that ultimately will be determined by your site architecture, having the right silos, the job board, the metadata behind each of the jobs. Very important that it is generated automatically and has the correct layout. 

Rick Mare: The next one, here is no arrow. So often when a site is built at the start, you know, a lot of effort is put into making sure that there's no errors in images at the right size. There's no dead links, et cetera. But as a website gets older, these tend to be introduced purely because nobody focuses on, on, on checking it.

Rick Mare: So part of our tool set that we recommend is having a permanent report. Reporting on all of the areas on your side. So images are too big, dead links, et cetera. And then finally, once you've got these four layers covered, then you call web vitals, which is Google's new way of seeing whether a site is. Is it working well there? They've changed it from one parameter being page B to now three parameters.

Rick Mare: And if you focus on those three parameters and those rights, then your score within Google will be graded. And that will then complete everything that you've got built into your website. So this is absolutely critical. So let's move on to the next slide.

Nicole Clarke: Okay, so where to start. So probably the biggest problem that we see very often, and this happens not only with small start out recruitment agencies, but it goes all the way through to some of the world's largest going to a traditional recruitment marketer to give you insights and potentially build a recruitment website.

Nicole Clarke: Unfortunately. It's not going to give you the technical aspects. Like what rich, Rick just mentioned then often marketing agencies come up with something very beautiful and they. For a lot of great suggestions from content, but going back to that ideal site architecture we will talk about that more as we traveled through here, but you need dedicated pages that talk about what you do, and all the aspects mentioned around making sure that your job board is optimized for search.

Nicole Clarke: Your jobs are optimized for search is so very important. The technology behind the platform that you choose to use for your recruitment website is paramount in making all of those pieces work seamlessly and very well. So just be careful, I'm not using an expert in recruitment because if you miss little pieces that can make a massive difference to your brand online. And we often see companies spending a lot on it. And unfortunately they're doing it with people that don't necessarily understand the recruitment industry extremely well. So they're often wasting a lot of money and that's something that we have seen.

Nicole Clarke: Things to do, you know, fix that foundation. You need a solid foundation, which should be your brand in the world wide web, being your website, and then all roads should lead back to that brand. And that website, even if you're using LinkedIn as a strategy which is great. You still need to remember your brand, make sure you've got high level SEO on your website.

Nicole Clarke: Make sure it's set up correctly and you've got good integrations going that are going to save you a lot of time and automate a lot of processes. And it's the same as job board technology. If you get these pieces right, your SEO will be enhanced quite dramatically and it's not gonna cost you any extra.

Nicole Clarke: The final point. Don't fly blindly, measure everything. You need to be understanding where your leads are coming from. What are the ones that are converting and make sure that you're not wasting your money because there's lots of things you could be spending it on to be more successful. So that's where to start.

Rick Mare: Great. Thank you, Nicole. So let's move on to why we put such a big focus on Google. Now, as you can see from the graph Google accounts for 87% of all global searches. And that's why really Google also has the best toolset. So they've supplemented their own search engine with Google analytics, Google webmaster tools, really all the tools to let you understand what is right with.

Rick Mare: With your digital brand and what's wrong. So they've recently introduced the core web vitals, which I mentioned. So, you know, we see Google as the leading player in this space, and that's why really you should focus solely in our opinion, on Google cause the other two Yahoo being tend to follow Google anyway.

Rick Mare: Now the other important reason why Google is so important in our suite, Discussion is that 30% of all searches on Google are job-related. Now that is translated to 300 million searches a month for jobs they're all free so if you get your recipe right, and you follow certain things, you can certainly read the rewards.

Rick Mare: Free searches and you can obviously always supplement that with additional paid searches, but, you know, in our opinion gets your foundation, right. And that will all make a big difference to whatever you do online.

Nicole Clarke: So we mentioned before around site architecture it seriously is the most important piece of your SEO. Success online and what we talk about here, you're obviously going to have all your traditional pages, your home about us, meet the team and in your main navigation. But the other piece you need to be thinking about there's a few, there's a few pieces.

Nicole Clarke: Each of your recruiters or each of your team members should have their own profile on the way. Ideally you want people coming through to your brand when they're looking for someone that works at your business rather than being channeled out elsewhere, we do talk about when you build out recruiter profile pages, if those recruiters specialize in particular jobs, their jobs should also be on those pages as well.

Nicole Clarke: You can in effect quite easily, turn those pages into QR codes, if you wanted to. So they could go on business cards if you have them or other areas so people can easily connect. The other thing to be thinking about are those silos that Rick mentioned before you've got two or three streams of audience that you're trying to attract.

Nicole Clarke: You've got the job seeker. They're looking for jobs and we've already seen how many searches there are on Google, which is just staggering. So, and then the next silo is employers that are looking to use recruitment providers' services. And then the other might be, you're trying to recruit internally for team members.

Nicole Clarke: So there's three really distinct silos there with great opportunities for SEO. A good example just to mention is, you know, if you're in construction recruitment, you're looking for people who want jobs in construction and employers that want to find staff in that space. So you need to create landing pages that talk to that.

Nicole Clarke: So that is construction jobs. And on that page you should be content with why you're the expert to find people who are looking for jobs in construction, why you, the person they should choose. And that should have the recruiter profiles coming through to that for the people who are relevant to the construction industry should have the construction jobs.

Nicole Clarke: And in essence, what you're doing is building out landing pages that are going to attract really great SEO. But importantly, when that click happens on Google, they're coming through to a page that's highly relevant to the search they did. And they can find everything they need from that page. So very, and the URL structure should be construction jobs.

Nicole Clarke: The metadata that Rick spoke about before should be construction jobs and all the contents should back that up and on the flip side on another page, which is an employer focus page, it should be all about construction recruitment. The content should talk about why you're experts at finding great people in construction and potentially the relevant people that will deal with the clients.

Nicole Clarke: Their profiles should also pull through to that page and you should have an inquiry now form or submit a job inquiry and just build out that ecosystem. So there are things on the website that you're going to convert for you and make you more successful in search. 

Rick Mare: Fantastic. Thank you. This is the most important thing.

Rick Mare: So we will keep referring back to it as we go through this presentation. So the next one is your job pages. Now, obviously, if you're recruiting, you've got, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 jobs or more, that is all considered fresh content by search engines. 

Rick Mare: So every day that you get a new job, they will consider that new content. So it's very similar. How, you know, a lot of SEO experts go on about blog articles and you've got to write one blog article a day. A job is essentially an article a day. So, you know, recruiters are in a very fortunate position that you have. Ongoing fresh content. So it's very important that actual content is highly optimized.

Rick Mare: So we'll have two slides here, one just talking generally in concept, and then we'll show you sort of what that looks like on your page. So firstly though, the three things that we still see happening today is Iframe. So, you know, in terms of the three biggest points here, don't ever use iframes, because what that means, it's a window to another world.

Rick Mare: So think of the matrix you're going into another world. So search engines don't read that. So if you have an iframe on your page that goes to another URL, it's ignored by search engines, link outs. So it's again, another sort of strange element in the recruitment space. When you go to a recruitment website and then link out to an ATS URL that you are real over the ATS.

Rick Mare: Shows jobs on the ATS, but it doesn't associate it with your brand. So if you're, you know, Worldstaffingstaffing.com and your link goes to linkout.com again, in the eyes of a search engine, you don't own any jobs. And obviously as a recruiter, you want to own as many jobs as possible and then the other one, these weird URLs.

Rick Mare: So often when we go back to one of the first slides, when we see marketing agencies that don't understand the world of recruiting, what you'll see is you'll see a URL that might be slash. J/A/ 1, 2, 3, and that to a search engine means nothing. And on the next slide you'll see sort of what we're talking about.

Rick Mare: So a couple of really important things here, URL is important. It needs to be relevant and not too long. The meta title and description are very important to be dynamically generated job schema, which is what. Sits behind what the human eye can see is very important because it can contain content that is not visible on the page so that when a search engine scrapes that page, it gets further information.

Rick Mare: It's rich data and some more technical things here. Your jobs need to be added to the sitemap XML. That is again what Google search console likes to read. So it's a lot quicker for them to read a site map than it is to scrape the site. In its entirety. So. Most people don't know how to do that, or don't even know it's important.

Rick Mare: And then some other smaller items are, have similar jobs linked on the page, have calls to actions like job alerts, social sharing. Have your consultants listed on the page and your H1, H2 are well-defined. So now that I've talked about it, let's have a look at what that looks like on a typical page.

Rick Mare: So this is a typical page, so you can see here at the top The metatarsal, it needs to be relevant to the job, not generic. So a lot of sites will just say job search again, that doesn't help search engines. So you really, in this case, should say construction labor is high at residential. JV recruitment.

Rick Mare: So that's the first part that the search engine looks at the top part there, the meta title, then the URL, it needs to contain the job title and other data and not just an awful string. Then your H1 is the heading tags, which is in this case, construction, labor as a high end residential, you've got your social sharing.

Rick Mare: And your similar jobs and then behind the scenes, there's a lot more other data happening. So this is super important. So everyone on this session here too, they can actually go to their own site and see how well they're doing compared to this. Moving on to the next slide. 

Nicole Clarke: Yeah, so landing pages and campaign pages and just backing up what we just went through, what you just went through there, and it is extremely complex.

Nicole Clarke: A lot of people just think it's quite easy and it all comes together, but unless you've got technology backing up all of these things you really do miss opportunities, which you don't want to miss because it makes the difference. So being found on landing pages and campaign pages, I've got some great recruitment agencies who are using these two for lots of different purposes to attract the right people through to these pages.

Nicole Clarke: So if you think with a lot of people at the moment doing pay-per-click advertising where you might do some Google advertising or some LinkedIn advertising, you might have a, in this example, a high-end CFO. That you're looking to recruit for, and it might warrant the fact that the client or the employer that you've been talking to.

Nicole Clarke: You've been able to say to them, you know, we believe that recruitment is marketing and we actually want to brand your business. And your company is part of our attraction strategy for this opportunity that you've got. These pages can be locked down so you can have the requirements. The passcode to be able to access these pages.

Nicole Clarke: So, the only people you give the code to are people who've requested that. So you might send a link through LinkedIn saying, Hey, Rick senior profile thought it would be perfect for this opportunity. You're one in 15 people. We've chosen. You send the message to Rick. Rick says, great. I'd like to know more than you can send Rick the passcode to be able to access this.

Nicole Clarke: It's just another really good way of doing things a bit differently. Alternatively, you can use these learnings. I just in campaign pages for really high conversion, we'll use that construction jobs example from earlier, this could be construction jobs. This could be rather than always asking people to apply for a job.

Nicole Clarke: You could register your interest. We know that does garners a lot more inquiries. When you get. But the great thing with this, if you are to put jobs on this page as well in a job search, you can have a real hub that you could then do some pay-per-click advertising to target people in the construction industry.

Nicole Clarke: So when they click on the link that they've seen in advertising, they come straight through to this really highly converting page. You can then do all sorts of other things as well around checking which one works the best by doing a bit of testing on different looks and feels and yeah, just open up the opportunities to think a little bit outside the square where everyone else is playing to try and attract talent as well.

Nicole Clarke: Yeah. That's a great point. And importantly, yeah. Importantly, track the pages too. You want to know how they converting, where your traffic coming from? 

Rick Mare: Yeah. And that's a good point, Nicole. Having these pages on their own, it gives you the ability to. Better track your ad spend on Google or other places what actually convert.

Rick Mare: The other thing is with landing pages. Sometimes it's good to remove your recruitment brand header and just have a very generic page or with the client's logo on there as well. So that it does feel like it's a different world. So you know, there are lots of options for landing and campaign pages that really optimize your business.

Rick Mare: So we look at the next slide. So going on to on-page and off-page SEO. So basically on pages what happens on your site and off page is what happens on other sites. So we've covered a lot of this already, but I think this ultimately starts to crystallize why we're talking about these things in the previous slide being this site, ideal recruitment site architecture and the job pages and the landing pages because what onsite SEO looks at is the content.

Rick Mare: So if you, for example, don't have an employer and a separate candidate landing page, the content is going to be mixed up. And the most common thing that we see in Nicole's example, people just say services, construction. Now, to a search engine that doesn't, it doesn't know that you're a construction recruitment company.

Rick Mare: It could mean that your construction consulting company, or you could actually be a construction company. So this is where those silos and all of the intricacies that we're talking about, make a big difference, the content, the keywords, et cetera. So if you have construction recruitments, That will work much better.

Rick Mare: Then the follow on is we've spoken about a number of times, use the method, tags and title, if they're automatically generated on those pages and on the jobs that will, again, you know, back up those sector pages or silos that we're creating. And then if you then add on to the correct URL structure, the job schemers, the site map, et cetera, then you're going to get a very high school in terms of on page SEO.

Rick Mare: That's ultimately what you're trying to achieve to then be better indexed. So the off page SEO is a little bit harder and that is where a fair bit of work comes into. So things like backlinks. So that is where in the worldwide, where are people linking back to your site and what authority do those sites have?

Rick Mare: So obviously things like if you link back from LinkedIn for example, or other sites then that is starting to add that up, but there are lots of other places you could put yourself in directories, government sites, et cetera. So I think backlinks linking back to domain authority. How long has your domain been around?

Rick Mare: Have you ever been blacklisted? All of those things, you know, are important. Speed and security is the one that obviously Google is focused on. Funny enough, you know, the number of sites that we look at there is still a high amount of sites that still aren't secure. Now Google's been saying this for the last, probably six, seven years that you need to be SSL secured in order to rank well in search engines, there's still people that don't get the simple fact that if you don't and especially as a recruiter the data that's entered can be compromised.

Rick Mare: So very important. All of the company listings in the world wide web, and there are many out there that list your sites in their directories need to be correct. So as part of, one of the tools that we'll talk about a bit later is you really need to understand out of all the pages where your website, where your recruitment business exist, how many have the correct information and how much, how many have the wrong information and how many walking you'll be on, then you've got your social metrics, which is. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera. 

Rick Mare: How do you appear on those? And what's the linkage back and then reviews? Probably one of the ones that is now being treated by Google. Exceptionally high as how many reviews have you got? Have you a Google my business? Are there good reviews on the bad reviews?

Rick Mare: How many do you have, et cetera? So there's a lot of opportunity for everyone in recruitment to get this bit right. Cause it's known as a, as we said before, it's a recipe for you to succeed. If you know what you need to do, the tools are super important.

Nicole Clarke: One of the things I just wanted to add there for that SEO piece. If anyone takes anything away Google , my business is so important. You should be posting content. So Google my business, just like you post content to LinkedIn, you need to be regularly sharing content on there.

Nicole Clarke: Uploading photos of your organization and the people within the organization. That along with the reviews that Rick mentioned make a big difference to your SEO. Sorry Rick. 

Rick Mare: Yeah, no, absolutely. It's important that we stipulate these important things. So moving on to the next one. So what I've done here are some tips for job postings and these again whilst we cover them off quite frequently, Still there's a lot of sites, a lot of recruiters that don't follow this.

Rick Mare: So let's go through, and this may be, you know, stating the obvious, but don't use slashes in job titles because search keyword searches. Don't pick them up as well as if they weren't there so they can count and slash administration, unless it's picking up part of the keywords search. I usually would have to talk to an accountant/administration for that to be picked up.

Rick Mare: So very important that you actually split things out and think human, think what is a person, a job seeker going to type in. They're not going to type in accountant/administration. They're going to hire an accountant. So these can be very minor changes that can make a big impact, including significant keywords in the job titles.

Rick Mare: So, you know, put as many of the important parts in the job title. Could be, you know, a finance accountant in Sydney, for example. But having that there is important. Also have the major keywords about the job in bullet points at the start of the job ad. So people can scan it as per the next item. Scan it very quickly to find a job paying 110 in Sydney.

Rick Mare: That's really all that they need to know to scan it quickly. Don't use abbreviations like SA for System Analyst, because it can mean many different things across the board. And people don't necessarily search for SA unless it's very popular. To him and show you job schemes that we've covered that generate similar jobs, et cetera, and show recruitment consultants on your pages so that they can easily connect with them.

Rick Mare: So there's some basic tips here. What I'll go on now are some trends for 2021. So these are the things that we've sort of picked up. In the recruitment website space, but also outside. So AI will continue to have a big impact on SEO. As people start to use AI more, the content on your website needs to be understood by artificial intelligence.

Rick Mare: So again, all of the things that we've mentioned become important when introducing AI, because if your site doesn't talk about construction recruitment, but rather about construction, then AI is going to translate that into. The wrong thing. So, you know, the pattern is starting to form and your foundation becomes more and more important, your voice searches.

Rick Mare: So now Google assistant, Apple, Siri, Amazon Alexa, they're saying by 2022. So by the end of this year, 55% of households will have that. And if you don't begin, have yourself registered on those platforms, which is totally outside of SEO. You need to register your brand on Amazon Alexa, accordingly on being on Apple, et cetera, because if you don't, then you're not indexed.

Rick Mare: So it's associated most of the time with map searches and accessibility given the move to mobile they're saying by 2025, 73% of all Internet users we'll be doing that through mobile devices. So, you know, the mobile first has been spoken about for a long time, but it's becoming more and more important because people don't depend on keyboards and I'm using a lot of voice typing as well.

Rick Mare: People can move quicker without the keyboard. You know, there are some cases where the keyboard will almost not be used, so I need to focus on accessibility. Some other ones, a video and a video again, have been spoken about for a long time, but you know, YouTube alone has over a billion users. That's a significant portion of the world.

Rick Mare: You need to have a strategy to use video in your recruitment messaging. For us, the clients that we have to use video are much more successful in their overall strategy than people that don't use video. That's just maybe a point worth talking about semantically related keywords. So this comes back again to the sort of the ideal recruitment side.

Rick Mare: So Google is now starting to analyze things a lot more because they've implemented the AI search. So this really does support what we've been saying for a long time in that if your content is much more drawn out and defined like instructor recruitment, it means that Google can understand it a lot better in the context of recruitment.

Rick Mare: The final point here is don't skimp or contact to build your brand. So Google has followed each format for a very long time, which is expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And if you follow that, then again, your brand will become stronger and stronger. 

Nicole Clarke: Rick, just on that too. I will add to that point when you're writing your content on your website, each page should have a minimum of 600 words to be.

Nicole Clarke: Well, SEO, optimized. Yeah. Ideally some more is good. But also writing some of your content with questions that people would pose in a voice search is also extremely good for SEO. So where do I find a construction recruitment agency in Brisbane, for instance? So writing content, asking and answering questions is important.

Rick Mare: Yeah. Good. So we're now moving on to the tool. So we've spoken a lot about sort of our whole philosophy around getting your brand as well optimized on your website as possible. But now, as we mentioned before, you need to have the tools to measure it. Because if you can't measure it, you can't improve it and you can't track over time whether you're going backwards.

Rick Mare: Or actually improving. So let's have a look at the tools that we recommend or suggest you use in your business. 

Nicole Clarke: Yeah. So there's a few here that we will run through a little bit more in depth in a second, but we're going to look at marketing dashboards. So then there's some cool tools out there now where you can really see everything at a bird's eye view and you don't need to work too hard to get the data and analytics out of it at all.

Nicole Clarke: It can present it all in one place rather than having to go to lots of different places. Google search console we've touched upon and we'll jump into that. Some more soon Google analytics look at a must have to really be able to delve a bit deeper and see exactly what's going on with your brand at a high level.

Nicole Clarke: And then the SEO audit side of things, there is so much opportunity with SEO audits. Not only to look at if there's any errors on your website or images that are too big, as you add more and more pages to your website, often there'll be some things there that need to be improved. A good SEO audit tool will highlight those and you can go in and easily fix them.

Nicole Clarke: But more importantly, looking at your competitors, what are they doing? What are they appearing for that you wish you were appearing for? And then being able to start adding pages to your website that can potentially capture some of that really you know, high profile, great traffic that you might want to get through to a brand.

Rick Mare: Right. Let's have a look at it as he did, in some detail. 

Nicole Clarke: Yeah. So marketing dashboard this tool we actually do have it's a bit of a game changer. What it does is it looks at and brings together any of your SEO information. So your Google analytics data can stream through. Your search console information constraint through to the central dashboard.

Nicole Clarke: You can have things like Rick mentioned earlier, you know, the need to get started getting reviews on your website. You need to be asking your candidates and your clients to leave you reviews. And ideally what you want with those reviews is get them onto Google. Get them onto Facebook, get them onto sites that are going to.

Nicole Clarke: With your SEO optimization. You know, getting reviews internally is great. If you're trying to sort of just check on how the business is going, but more importantly, you need them out in the world where people are finding them coming to your business. Because they're rating those reviews. So reviews are important.

Nicole Clarke: Being able to respond to those reviews. If they're coming from multiple channels, you can actually do that now through one central dashboard. You've got lots of different tools around your website and analytics, as well as if you are doing any pay-per-click advertising too. Through Google. It's good to be able to have all that data and information through, into one place and then social posting.

Nicole Clarke: So, you know, if you are, as I said before, if you're sharing content out to LinkedIn, which we often find a lot of recruiters just focus purely on LinkedIn, you need to ideally. Be thinking about LinkedIn, but think about all the other channels that can benefit by having your data and information on it, like should be sharing to Google my business.

Nicole Clarke: As we said before, really important, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram you know, if you're using Tik Tok and all the different channels that there are, but make it easy for yourself. So you push it out once and then those roads lead back to your website. So that you're building up that domain authority, the tree to your website is extremely important.

Rick Mare: And most importantly, on that one, just in addition to what Nicole said, you can actually track which channel is working because everything is tracked. So you can see Facebook versus LinkedIn versus Twitter, et cetera. So you can actually probably uncover channels that you may not be using now very easily.

Nicole Clarke: And with a click of a button, run an executive report on your entire brand. Cool SEO audit. Touched upon this one when we were talking about the tools, but another great way to just understand what's going on with your brand online. How are you tracking? Comparison to your competitors. Being able to look at what your competitors are doing, are they paying for advertising?

Nicole Clarke: Are they paying for ads on Google? What keywords are they bidding on? And what price are they paying for those, you know, all of those sorts of things. If you go and you analyze, okay, well, X, Y, Z recruitment agency that I compete with is bidding on the keyword construction jobs. How much traffic are they getting to that page?

Nicole Clarke: And if you can start getting a natural SEO bumped up with the right keywords you'll find that you can get some of that traffic, but it also gives you some ideas of, okay. You could be bidding on as well, but more importantly, understanding what's converting. What's not converting and putting a little bit of time and effort into building out more content and pages within your website is going to help you with your SEO.

Rick Mare: Yeah, absolutely. So this screenshot that is obviously covered greatly by, by the middle of there is the SEO tool that we use. And as you can see on the right-hand side, the sort of where the green lines are that automatically calculates your core web vitals. And then it runs it automatically every week.

Rick Mare: So every week you can sort of see the trend that you're working against, and then it also has an issues report. Nicole briefly covered that sort of says, okay, you've this image on this page is now too big. And so it really keeps you in tune and on your toes to see what's working. And what's not with the changes that you've made.

Rick Mare: So yeah, highly recommended tool like that, moving on to Google analytics. So, you know, understanding your goals, you know, who comes to the site where they're coming from, who's referring to it, bounce rate time aside campaign. So they're all really important elements for you to understand. And especially when you talk about gold conversions, if you, for example, want to understand how many people are converting from X to Y and the messaging that you may have, you know, that's really important.

Rick Mare: So Google analytics is a great source of information. It is not the only source and a lot of people that we tend to only use Google analytics to track everything, but it certainly doesn't give you the macro view on all the things that Nicole has covered so far, which is, you know, SEO and marketing related.

Rick Mare: So it's one of many tools that we recommend. And then Google search console, which used to be called Google webmaster tools has been rebranded. So this is continuing to change and we've already seen many changes over the past, sort of 6 to 12 months in this, but it's where you get to submit your site map, for example.

Rick Mare: So if you have a sitemap that doesn't have jobs. Then it's going to throw up errors, et cetera. So these are the reasons, again, why we've gone through the first part in such detail, because now if you have the correct setup, you can actually start a game. The benefits from all the tools here are as you can see by the graph, the trend, you can see the trend going up or down the coverage that you may have.

Rick Mare: And it's also got other elements here, like core web vitals and job posting specifically in here. So you can see if you have errors with your job postings, which is what it looks at for the job schema. So again, you know, job schema, site, mat, URL, all these things are starting to become very important as we go through this.

Rick Mare: So hopefully that makes a little bit of sense now. So that was it really. What we had planned to go through today. Now, what we've done as a business, we have sort of put our experience in a lot of what we spoke about today for the first part of the presentation into eBooks. So we've got one called site architecture, which really talks about the ideal recruitment site architecture.

Rick Mare: And if you follow that we can almost guarantee you, you will succeed at building a better recruitment brand. Then we've also got a book on SEO, which really covers a lot of the things specifically for SEO. So not much about the site architecture, very much about what you need to do to get the SEO, and then SEM also known for paid search.

Rick Mare: So your Google ad words paid ad-words. What to do and what not to do. So those three books, we highly recommend you download them so that you can, that can be found. It is at shazamme.com/ebooks, and they're free to download if you want, but any recruitment marketing person or business owner should be aware of what we've covered in those books.

Rick Mare: And here's the pile of slides. So you can contact us to talk about anything, recruit marketing. And we've got our details there. We've got 24/7 chats on our websites. So. Engage with us in a chat function or have us do a free diagnostic on your website. We do actually have the score app, which isn't listed here, but we do have a score app that you can find that lets you go through about, I think it was 37 questions.

Rick Mare: And after that, it will give you a score as to how well you should be ranking. And if you don't, then I'll give you tips on what you should be doing. So very much for you as. The call over to you. 

Nicole Clarke: Yeah, no, thank you to everyone who did join us. We are definitely here to help you be more successful online, regardless of whether you end up using Shazemme or not.

Nicole Clarke: We love recruitment marketing. We love helping people be more successful and there are so many opportunities. If you do things correctly and have the right technology supporting it and yeah, and don't waste money, test and try. Different things that your competitors aren't doing, because there's lots of candidates that are out there that you can get in front of today.

Nicole Clarke: You might not be. I'm so happy to talk about any of those strategies and thank you so much for joining us. 

Rick Mare: Thank you everyone. Back to the host.