SEO can split into 4 basic areas: Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO and Social Media Causation/Correlation.

Technical SEO accounts for about 9-11 tasks related to your website, its design and the server speed it is hosted on. Think simple stuff, like is the site made to work on a mobile (responsive design/dedicated design/mobile-first design)?

Then think even simpler. You can have the best responsive design in the world but if you stuffed it full of oversized images, you can destroy the page load speed! SEO goes out of the window at this point. Or paying £2.99 for hosting sounds too good to be true because it is.

If £2.99 were a concert ticket, it would be like turning up for an Ed Sheeran concert at the O2 and finding your £2.99 hosting bought you a seat on the window-cleaning cage hanging off Tower One at Canary Wharf and a set of take-away binoculars. So anyone just trying to brush over SEO with “yes, our site has SEO” is like a Boris or a Jeremy looking to avoid the uncomfortable details of manifestos, pledges and promises.

The problem you will face with most SEO snake-oil pitches is you are going to be told these items are the meaning of life, the holy grail, but the reality is their effect can be limited or life-changing, based on other factors like how well your competition did its Off-Page SEO.

And so to Off-Page SEO. So this is the area of SEO, supposedly, where the dark arts take place and you might be pitched by Harry, Hagrid, Severus Snape or Lord Voldemort (spooky how much he looks like Steve Leach… SEO joke).

The art, if there is one, is in keeping up with all the rule changes that Google makes to decide if linking to your mate’s plumbing website is a legitimate vote for how good you are at recruitment. Sorry, let me back up. Off-Page is all about how another website kind of votes for your website being a purveyor of fine quality content or advice.

That vote can, as you can imagine, be quite easily manipulated, and in the past 15 years I have worked on recruitment SEO projects, I’d say that Off-Page dictates about 98% of what you are going to get ranked for in highly competed-for keyword territory.  Like if you want to be ranked for sales jobs, or finance jobs or accounting jobs, you are gonna need a rich uncle or a lottery win.

Now for a bit of conclusive perspective. SEO is not one thing, and what you rank for is complex but also easily researched if you just stop, take stock and look past the bullshit that surrounds my industry.

Candidates look for jobs, and employers look for suppliers. They do that by putting words into Google for what they want to find.  In general, the shorter the search term, the more generic the search is (sales jobs). The shorter the search term, the more the general nature of the search term typically makes Off-Page SEO essential to be a success, due to your competition, who have the places in the ranking you want to disrupt. They will have trust and authority with Google you will need to dislodge; votes for your site via Off-Page do that.

The longer the search term, the more you can look to On-Page SEO and Technical SEO doing it for you (in-bound sales jobs near Preston). These terms done right are often just about getting your On-Page and Technical SEO right, or can be about setting up some key pages and supporting them with a small amount of Off-Page SEO.

Why is it important to know all this? Off-Page SEO will cost £600 to £6000 a month.

On-Page SEO can often be a one-time cost, affected only by your copywriting skills and how well you know how to work or are taught to work your website admin. Technical SEO will be present in all 20 of the vendors in the first 20-30 links of Google search for “recruitment website design”.

Got any questions or need any more advice on how your recruitment website can help? 

Then connect with me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/recruitmentwebsitedesign/

 

Darren Revell

Director

Please note I am Dyslexic, and in my form, I am blind to grammar, and sometimes I get my fors and fours, etc. backwards.  I am not stupid – in fact, my IQ and EQ are both quite high.  Please keep that in mind when you read my posts.  Thanks.