Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.
I apologize, looks like we had a little bit of technical difficulty the live broadcast wasn’t going. So spin up a new one, I’ll make sure to put this link in the other scheduled events. So apologize for any confusion. I’m Jeff Pelliccio, the founder of Allied Insight, and we are back again with another Weekly Bite bringing you guys some morsels of information that you could take back to your teams and try to elevate your game and move the ball forward a bit, right? We’re going to be bringing in things like marketing strategies and business tips that you can use at your staffing agency in order to take advantage of the technology that’s available and even just some of the resources that you have at your fingertips.
This week, we’re going to be talking about getting Googleable. So we’re really digging into the SEO piece. A lot of times when I’m in conversations with different staffing firms, SEO definitely comes up a lot. You know, why is this important? You guys are gonna go through and whether you’re spending time, money, or resources really doesn’t matter. But you’re putting effort into your websites and into your digital space, it would be good to understand the fundamentals of what SEO is to make sure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck. So, if you’re going to go forward and try to do landing pages or blogs or work on your static pages, at least at that point, you’re using the best practices. So that you can get it to not only look good and function well for the people that are visiting your website, but also so that search engines pick you up, and you can start getting some traction that way.
What I’m going to do first is I’m going to dig into the different types of SEO that there are, if you type in SEO in a Google search today, you’re going to end up seeing a variety of different elements or types of SEO. So we’re going to just dig through each one, explain briefly what it is, and then we’ll move into how you can take advantage of this at your staffing firm.
The first one out the gate is going to be technical SEO, when you’re thinking of technical SEO, this really takes into consideration the entire website. So imagine for a second that you weren’t a staffing agency, imagine you were a restaurant. And instead of having one door for an entrance, you had doors all over the building, right? In various different places; front side back, then instead of having like a host station, you know, you’ve got hosts just sort of wandering around the building, your dining room is sort of askew, you’ve got multiple kitchens, it would be really, really hard for someone to come into your restaurant and know what the process is that they need to follow in order to make sure that they can get fed.
The same thing happens with your website when you’re looking at it from a search engine perspective. If your website isn’t set up properly, understand that this is the front door, here’s the host station, here’s where you would sit to eat the kitchen is going to bring out your food from there. If it doesn’t understand how your website works, it’s going to have a really hard time propping it up in order to tell other people what the experience should be like if they went to your website. So from a technical SEO piece, the first piece is going to be like things like a sitemap, where you can kind of lay out your website and make sure that again, as things are being crawled by search engines, they understand where everything sort of lives. From there, you’re going to be looking at site performance. Again, if the kitchen is really slow, if your waitstaff is slow, if your menu is weak, then people aren’t going to come to your restaurant, the same thing happens when it comes to your website.
So you’ll want to make sure that you’ve got really good site performance, that you’ve got good page speed, that you don’t have broken links, that you don’t have toxic backlinks or people who are backlinking to your website that may be dragging your score down. And so all of those things are going to be really important to make sure that you end up with really strong site health. And all of those things as they continue to go down the line will give you stronger domain authority.
All of that kind of equates to search engines understanding that you know what you’re talking about, that the people who visit you appreciate the content that you have, they stay there, and then you start to sort of like moving up in the rankings.
As we move from technical SEO, again, making sure that the website functions properly, we then move into on-page SEO. Now on-page SEO, this starts getting a little bit more technical as it pertains to like how things are set up and orchestrated. So you know, if you had a book, right, you’d want obviously the title of the book to be present so that you know what it is that you’re about to read. You’d also want to make sure that there are h1 tags, right? You want something that sort of catalogs like what the entry point is, you know, you might have some h2s or some.
It just basically sets up a hierarchy for your content. So like you have h1 for titles, typically h2, h3, h4, and the list goes on until you get to paragraph copy or body copy. All of those create a hierarchy that search engines look at to say, this is what this thing is supposed to be talking about. Therefore, the body copy should have the same context. And it tries to decipher to make sure that the thing that they’re going to prop up to the searcher is relevant to what the person wants. So the whole name of this game here is making sure that they’re taking good care of their customer, which is the person doing the search. And that when they prop you up, you’re giving the information that that person is in fact looking for. So your on-page SEO is going to be things like your hierarchy. It’ll be things like your meta tags or your page descriptions, you know, ensuring that like, again, as you look at the information, holistically, like in the big picture, that it actually incorporates all the different elements that someone should understand from a summary perspective, what that page is going to deliver.
The next goes into off-page SEO, obviously, if you have on-page you have off-page. So the off-page SEO has to do with backlinking. And so I’m going to also include internal linking as a conversation here, I know that like some people will say, well, that’s not really off-page SEO. Linking is important. Okay, when you’re on your website, or if you’ve ever been to a publishing house, and you’ve seen a blog or an article that gets to a certain point, let’s say you’re on a blog, and it’s talking about SEO. And on that blog, as it talks about SEO, it says off-page SEO.
With that, if it’s hyperlinked, you would assume by clicking on it, you would get more information regarding off-page SEO. I would probably assume that I would get that information from the source itself as well.
So being in marketing, I would assume that that website would take me from the topic deeper into a more defined meaning or give me some greater explanation to this one given subtopic, allowing me to then bounce back to the article to finish reading. Internal linking is internal linking, not leaking. Internal linking is important. Because it starts to create that web that allows people to come to your website and not just convert on one page, but then convert to a second or third page. The time that people spend on your site — that behavior is tracked. And search engines like to see people digging deeper, not bouncing out, bouncing that it’s called a bounce rate, we’re not going to get into that it’s not really important for this particular conversation. But linking helps let people sort of go down rabbit holes in your website in your space. Now that’s is internal linking.
There’s also external linking. So let’s just say, for instance, you write an article about something to do with market trends as it pertains to Healthcare staffing in 2022. And you find a resource, and you actually reference it, you link to it. When you do that activity, you can actually reach out to that resource and let them know, “Hey, by the way, Jeff, we’re going to be using one of your resources, would you mind linking to our website, you can use something called a do-follow link?” What that does is it lets people know that that publication endorses you right now. If they have higher domain authority, strong site health and good domain authority, higher domain authorities help boost your domain authority, you see how this goes.
So linking both outside and inside your website will help to again, improve sort of the stickiness as people are inside your space, and also improve your domain authority. As the search engines look at you in reference to whether or not you know you’re a good credible resource. As a sidenote on domain authority, just as a quick hit. Domain Authority will be the thing that allows you to get additional traction. So let’s say on a scale of one to 100, or zero to 100, is basically domain authority. If you’re in single digits, you know, search engines may not assume that they should give you that notoriety or recognition for whatever the topic is that you want to talk about. Now, if you’re in the 80s or 90s, well, then search engines are gonna look at you and say, “Wow, this group, this site has been really nailing it. They’ve been talking about these given topics, and they’ve really been, you know, providing good resources. And people tend to like them, they stay on their website a long time.” When you bring a new topic to the table, you kind of get a little bit of a bump, right? So they kind of like you don’t have to struggle as hard to start to get placement the in the SERP. Right, so search engine results page. So that’s off-page SEO backlinking and internal linking.
Now, as we move away from that you go into white hat SEO. So what is white hat SEO white hat SEO is basically making sure that you are abiding by the rules or that you’re in alignment with the best practices as set by the search engines. So Google, Yahoo, Bing, et cetera, whoever DuckDuckGo whatever it is that you’re using. If you align with their best practices and their best practices, really, honestly, it’s not a mystery. Their algorithm obviously is a mystery because they don’t want people abusing it or kind of like hacking it, like working around it. But what they’re trying to do is create a good experience for the searcher, right? They’re trying to provide information and prop up information that that individual who’s doing the Google search or doing the Yahoo search, what they’re looking for, they want to be able to give that information to the person first.
So instead of worrying about how to sort of like work around things, white hat SEO basically says, you as a group with a website, are going to do the things that you can to improve the experience for the individual visitor, making sure that you’re providing them good information, making sure that your titles and your h1 and h2 and your URLs all are in alignment with the purpose of the messages, and that your website is organized in a way that will be very easy and provide a really good user experience. That’s white hat SEO and its finest, right?
Now, I don’t have a little thing for Blackhat SEO, but let’s just talk about what it is for a quick second. So blackhat SEO is basically the antithesis of this, right? It’s the opposite. So if you’re familiar with back-in-the-day keyword stuffing that basically wraps it up in a nutshell, right? So blackhat SEO are the individuals who are not necessarily trying to align with search engines, but rather trying to sort of like beat them. You know, I think in the grand scheme of things is it possible to be the search engine? Of course, it’s possible, will it last? Probably not, search engines, they’ve got far more developers than you do and or that any of us do for that matter. And they’ll likely, you know, at some point, realize what’s happening and defuse it, right. So um, for that sake, I would say, spend your time on the white hat – white hat SEO best practices – in order to build a really good strong foundation that you know, won’t have many adjustments in the future and will provide you that stability that you can continue to build off of.
So now what opportunities exist as it pertains to staffing, right, because that’s really what we’re here to talk about is SEO for staffing. And so one of the things that I’ll tell you that I find is a huge opportunity, that’s a pretty big miss, in general, is your job description pages. So many of us have ATS is or, you know, if you’re using a CRM or whatever you’re using to be able to house your jobs. But you’re a lot of the staffing firms that I see are propping them up inside of a portal. Now that portal is owned by the software company, right. And what they likely will do is they’ll attach your URL to their URL as a subdomain. So this would be something like your staffing company.bullhorn.com, or your staffing company dot job diva.com or Avionte or any other ATS just plug them in, right. So if you’re, if your jobs are living in a subdomain of your applicant tracking system, you’re not getting credit for that traffic, the applicant tracking system is getting credit for that traffic. And so you have all these really good juicy terms and words and keywords and phrases and things that you’re using inside those job descriptions, that you’re not getting credit for it your website. So ideally, you would take that feed. So, a lot of ATS has will have either an RSS or an XML feed that you can extrapolate and then you can sort of design it into your website. Those would allow you to start to have those keywords and have those phrases and things recognized in your space where you get credit for it. Not to mention that traffic lives inside your domain, not a subdomain of another website. So jobs are a huge opportunity, with huge upside potential for staffing firms to take advantage of stronger SEO.
The next would be landing pages. So you can really go down, you know, a serious campaign route and try to build out a bunch of landing pages if you’ve got a variety of verticals if you have very specific geographic locations, or maybe even industry sectors. But as you sort of like develop those out, those are all additional pages, additional pages have additional words, those words will drive SEO provided that you’ve spent time obviously to build out SEO components. So keywords in this just to sort of like put a pin in that in the grand scheme of things in SEO, keywords like let’s say staffing, as an individual word will be highly competitive and will be very, very hard for you to be able to gain traction on to rank in any sort of setting unless you’re pumping out tons of volume on just the word staffing. With that said, if you turn it into what’s called as a long-tail keyword, like a phrase, you can likely get in front of the people that you’re looking to get in front of without necessarily having to compete at those higher volumes.
So let’s just say for instance, instead of just staff thing. What if you had healthcare staffing in Savannah, Georgia, right? That is really specific. But maybe you’re looking for health care people in Savannah, Georgia, I don’t know. Either way, by adding a long tail to it, it takes you out of staffing, you’ll still get credit for the word staffing, by the way, but it also gives you a span of words that individuals you’re seeking are using in their search fields. So that’s where keywords really come into play in the SEO world as it pertains to all those other elements that we talked about, you know, when you’re talking about doing that on-page SEO with those titles, that h1, h2, and body copy, that’s where a lot of those keywords are going to start to drop in.
Now when it comes to blogs and articles, this is another opportunity for staffing firms. So not a lot of staffing firms produce articles on a regular basis. But not only do those give you additional traction for SEO, but they also provide you with sales enablement and recruiter enablement resources. I’m going to say that, again, blog articles provide you not only SEO, but they also provide you with sales enablement, and recruiter enablement resources. If your content if your marketing strategy with your content strategy is in alignment with your sales process, you could be producing content that your team can use inside any of their pipeline, emails, automation, and so forth. It just provides an additional voice and allows you to also leverage thought leadership throughout the rest of the organization.Something to consider.
The next part is going to be pillar pages. I don’t think a lot of people can see their pillar pages are a little bit of they take some work. We’ll go back to a given vertical, let’s say if you’re a staffing agency, and you’ve got multiple verticals, IT, engineering, healthcare, accounting, and finance, you can build pillar pages to each of those verticals. And what that does is it sort of mashes all that content into one space, there are a lot of internal links, but you can then talk about the vertical itself. So let’s just say accounting and finance. So you know, in that NF category, you could talk about what it is that you do that’s so incredible in that NF sector. You can also speak to the industries that you participate in as it relates to accounting and finance roles. You could talk about what that process and certifications might look like. You can offer up jobs that are available in that sector, you can have blogs that are associated with it. And so what it does is it condenses that information down into one space, making it really easy for someone looking for accounting and finance information in staffing to come to that one resource, and then pivot wherever they need to go. Again, internal linking keywords, and pillar pages, really bring it all together.
I’m going really quick, and I apologize, but this is the basic framework of what it is that you would be looking at, in trying to put together an SEO strategy. I will give you a couple of pro tips here as well. Software is key. So if you are going to play the SEO game, you know, look for resources like SEMrush Moz, AHrefs, and SEO ranking tools that will give you insight into how your website is performing. They’ll connect with Google Analytics, they’ll connect with Google Search Console. And so they kind of take all that information, some of them even connect with your social media accounts. And you can see how things are interacting, you can see where your conversions are coming from what’s gaining traction, where your audience is growing, and then use that information to then develop additional content or additional strategies where you can then draw them in and send them down to an area of your website, which is set for conversion, conversion is key. So software is really, really important.
And then as a side note here, if you really want to play the SEO game, just keep in mind, that this is time and volume, right? Those are the two factors assuming that everything else is in place, time and volume are the two most important components of SEO at that point. And so if you wanted to really get a jump on it, three articles per week, for a year, basically set your groundwork. So now if you were to do less, you can, but just keep in mind, it’ll take you a little bit longer. And if you do more, it might go a little bit faster. But generally speaking, the rule of thumb is if you were to do three articles a week for 12 months, that should condense and consolidate a lot of SEO power into your website and allow you to really gain traction, a lot of the keyword strategies that you’re going to be doing. Now, if you’re working on SEO stuff at your staffing firm and you want any helper information, you can certainly know, just click on it, it’s over on the side, and everything is reversed. Just go ahead and click on the little guy there or you can just use your phone and you could scan that QR code. It’ll take you to our website, get into my calendar book sometime, I’ll be happy to talk to you about how you know what it is that you’re doing at your staffing agency, and give you some advice on how you can also improve your SEO strategy.
Otherwise, next week, we are going to be talking to Landon at help stone we’re going to be talking about the Salesforce vs ATS. So he has a company that basically can make Salesforce the center of your world and in any event. We’ll save that for next week. I hope you have found this segment informative and helpful. And then it helps you really advance the ball and improve the performance of your website. Have a great day. Have a great week and we will see you next week with another weekly bite. Have a good one everybody. Bye-bye.
