Recruitment websites are like a hybrid car that has a nice eco-friendly electric motor that will take your brand on a 30-mile round trip then need an 8-hour recharge if you want to make another journey and so fossil fuel is very much needed to make any serious journey.

In SEO and webs marketing terms fossil fuel would be the additional services you would buy to get your site ranking well. But these services are often expensive, and so cost-prohibitive. The following is a list of things you can do for yourself to help your site get traffic.

1.    Post all the jobs you have to your website even the ones you think you might not fill.

2.    Change the jobs every 14 days, Google for jobs especially likes fresh content. Google for  jobs favours the big job boards and services like LinkedIn but these sites tend to advertise jobs for a month at a time and one of the signals GFJ does look at for a site is how frequently you publish jobs.

3.    Post jobs to your website first and if you can job boards a couple of days later. Google for jobs favours the big job boards and services like LinkedIn so if yours is the original version of the job by a few days it can help yours to rank better inside the GFJ ecosystem.

4.    Share your jobs on your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook timelines etc.

5.    Share other posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook timelines etc that direct the user to visit your website to get the full answer like to a blogs post, or a case study or a testimonial or your terms of business or your staff member profile. In short use these mediums to redirect users to use your website as a primary source.

6.    Use all the features you bought, so if you took our candidate champion feature etc use them as this gives more pages of content for search engines to get a picture of what you provide.

7.    Run mailshots to get users to visit your site and use its features.

8.    Have an email reminder to candidates that register with you to use your job alert feature, have clients do the same for profile alerts if you are using candidate champion.

9.    There is no magic formula for content, of course, the content marketer will tell you different but over almost 20 years of tracking recruitment website activity on all continents in multiple languages, the best advice we can give is to keep your content base-wide. Google tell us 30% of their search engine use is for employment-related searches. The key here is employment-related so yes that will be job’s but it will also be all the who, what, when, where, why, how type questions about employment. Your blog feature is a great place to match the content that meets the needs of this wider 30 % of searches and get a better score for your website.

10. Take up any offer to guest blog on respect sites where a link to your website can be shared.

11. Take up any offer to speak on a podcast where you get the option to promote your website.

12. Use YouTube for video and link back to your site. These links count as a great vote for your website in SEO terms.

13. Get your website shared on partner sites.

14. Interview industry leaders, influencers, clients and candidates for their views and share that on your website (video is a very useful way).

15. Write high-quality content that matches the habits of long-tail search engine queries. The long tail is a form of search where the user makes a detailed search query like “how to get promoted if you are more qualified than your boss” or “ideal candidates will be in a 15-mile radius of Newmarket for this job”. Job boards and job aggregators tend to dominate the simple search terms like “accounting jobs” but door poorly at the long-tail queries, the more long-tail matches you can build up over time the better your site will be received by Google as matching the needs of the users who make this 30% of “employment-related searches”.

16. Build your Google business page listing.

17. Make sure to take advantage of Google reviews, they have a healthy benefit to getting you ranked for location-based searches.

18. Invite people from your niche to write blogs and articles you can put on your site to share with your audience.

19. Create content to give away online that is useful to your recruitment niche.

20. Run surveys from your website.

21. Run webinars from your website

22. Post a daily/weekly vlog.

23. Share relevant information in your blogs that link out to other influential blogs or a website with cool information to read for your recruitment niche.

24. Struggle with the written word? Say it with an infographic, video or voice recording instead.

25. Be consistent, the biggest failure we see to self-generate traffic is the honeymoon period is about 6 weeks for trying to get your own traffic. Then the excitement tails off and so does the content. If you want your site to generate you income you have to do this work or pay someone to do it for you.