SEO for recruitment agencies that keeps the board full
SEO for recruitment agencies has to serve two audiences from one crawl budget. Candidates land on a role page and apply within ninety seconds. Hiring managers land on a discipline page and decide whether you understand their market. When both groups compete for the same templates, the index fills with thin vacancies and the client enquiries dry up.
- Job page and city page index rules, decided per role family, not per template
- Expiry handling: evergreen, redirect or retire, with JobPosting data kept honest
- Employer brand content that hiring managers read before they call
- Candidate data kept out of the index and out of structured data
A working board — three columns, three index rules
Senior QA Engineer — Manchester
Salary band, hybrid pattern, interview stages, hiring manager quote.
JobPosting validInterim Finance Lead — Leeds
Day rate band published, no client name, three-stage process.
new · 3 daysCNC Machinist — Sheffield
Shift pattern, tooling exposure, relocation support stated.
refreshedDiscipline hub — QA & Test
Twelve live roles, salary benchmarks, contractor vs permanent guide.
cluster hubCity page — Leeds tech
Local market commentary, commute data, active roles by seniority.
ranking 6 → 3Filled: Head of Ops, Bristol
Kept as proof page, status updated, links to live equivalents.
evergreenWithdrawn: Warehouse Supervisor
Retired from index, 410 served, hub entry removed.
retiredClient case — logistics scale-up
Nine roles filled in one quarter, written for hiring managers.
b2b pageWhy the board empties after month two
The vacancy is not the problem. The lifecycle is.
Forty near-identical role pages
The same three sentences wrapped around a different job title creates forty competing URLs. Search engines pick one, usually the weakest, and the rest consume crawl budget that your discipline hubs needed.
Expired roles left standing
A candidate applies for a role filled in March, hears nothing, and stops trusting the site. Stale JobPosting markup also gets flagged, which drags the whole domain's rich results down with it.
Client language missing entirely
Every page speaks to applicants. Nothing answers "who fills technical sales roles in the Midlands" — the exact question a hiring manager types before shortlisting two or three agencies.
What you get
An index strategy with a rule for every state a vacancy can be in, plus a second content track aimed at the people who pay invoices.
Two audiences, two keyword sets
Candidate queries run on job title, location and salary. Client queries run on discipline, hiring problem and sector. We map them into separate clusters, separate templates and separate calls to action, so a page never tries to convert both at once. Client-side pages carry case evidence, fill rates and process; candidate pages carry pay bands, start dates and a two-field apply form.
An index rule for every vacancy state
Live roles with substance get indexed. Duplicates and shell requisitions are consolidated into discipline hubs. Filled roles either become evergreen proof pages or redirect to a live equivalent. Withdrawn roles leave the index and return 410 rather than a soft 200. JobPosting markup expires with the advert, because stale structured data is a manual-action risk, not a minor warning.
City and discipline hubs that hold authority
Role listings alone cannot rank against aggregators with thousands of pages. Hubs win because they combine live roles, a salary view, a market note and internal links into every relevant vacancy. That hub is also where you earn links: a quarterly pay survey for one discipline is a far better link asset than a careers page nobody cites.
Technical housekeeping on a large URL count
Segmented sitemaps by status, canonical rules for filter and pagination combinations, noindex on internal search and thin tag pages, crawl budget watched against the number of live URLs. When you add a new vertical, its sitemap and canonical pattern already exist, so growth does not degrade what is working. This unglamorous half of SEO Content Writing Services is what keeps a board of ten thousand URLs legible to a crawler.
The role template we build once
Consistency is what lets forty vacancies rank instead of forty pages competing. Every field below exists for a reason a candidate or a crawler needs.
Title pattern and heading order
Role, seniority and location in the H1, in the words candidates actually type. Sector goes in the subheading, not stuffed into the title.
Substance block before the apply form
Salary band, contract type, working pattern, interview stages and a line on why the role is open. Without these, the page is a duplicate of the client's own advert.
Structured data that expires with the role
JobPosting with datePosted, validThrough and hiring organisation. When the advert closes, the markup goes with it.
One link back to the discipline hub
Every vacancy links up to its hub and across to two comparable roles. That single rule is what stops the archive from becoming a dead end.
Senior QA Engineer
Candidates see pay and process. Crawlers see one canonical, one hub link and valid dates.
How the work runs
Five stages, sequenced so nothing is published before the index rules are agreed.
Intake
Crawl, Search Console, ATS export and a call with the consultants who fill the roles.
Segmentation
Roles split by family, city and status, with an index rule per segment signed off.
Template build
Vacancy, hub, city and client case templates built on staging with real adverts.
Publish cycles
New roles inherit the pattern, archived roles retire on a schedule, hubs refresh monthly.
Review
Applications, client enquiries and index coverage read together, not as separate reports.
Recent boards
A technology staffing firm, 6 months: qualified applications per month after duplicate vacancies were consolidated into nine discipline hubs.
An executive search boutique, 8 months: client enquiries from search, driven by sector pages and a published salary survey.
A healthcare recruiter, 4 months: index coverage cleaned from 2,400 stale roles, with rich results restored across live vacancies.
Show us your adverts. We will show you the rules.
Scope-based quote after a short call. Index policy agreed before anything is published.
Scope, quoted per desk
Pricing follows the number of role families, the markets you cover and how much content already exists. No flat package pretends those are the same.
- Index architecture: canonical, pagination, filter and sitemap rules by vacancy state
- Template design for vacancy, hub, city and client case pages
- Content: discipline hubs, salary benchmarks, market notes, hiring guides
- Copy support for consultants writing their own adverts, via a short field guide
- Technical SEO: crawl budget, Core Web Vitals on mobile apply flows, schema hygiene
- Authority: data-led PR, sector partnerships, citation consistency per office
- Conversion: apply-dropout analysis, shortlist form tests, call and WhatsApp tracking
- Reporting: index coverage, applications, client enquiries, revenue attribution
Where advert copy is written by consultants at volume, we pair the build with B2B SEO Agency so the field guide is tested on real adverts rather than theory.
Questions before you brief us
Should every vacancy be indexed?
Only those with enough substance to answer a search: a real salary band, location, discipline and process. Roles repeating the same three sentences across forty clients become near-duplicates and dilute the pages that could rank.
What happens to a role once it is filled?
Three options by role type: keep as an evergreen proof page if it recurs, redirect to a live equivalent if it was a one-off, or retire with a 410 if leaving it up would mislead a candidate.
How do candidate and client searches stay separate?
Different language, different intent. Candidates want pay, location and start date. Hiring managers want evidence you have filled that role before. Separate templates, separate calls to action, separate measurement.
How fast do new roles get indexed?
On an established domain, usually within days when the role is linked from a hub and sits in a segmented sitemap. Discovery is rarely the constraint; quality is.
How is candidate data protected?
No CV, email or phone number appears in an indexable page. Profiles sit behind authentication or are excluded server-side, and structured data describes the vacancy, never the applicant.
What does a monthly engagement include?
A fixed delivery sheet: pages built or refreshed, technical fixes, internal link changes and a report tying each to impressions, applications or client enquiries. Out-of-scope work is quoted, not absorbed.
Who you are working with
WebSEOGrow works with staffing firms, executive search boutiques and in-house talent teams across the UK, North America and the Gulf. We have rebuilt index policies for recruiters carrying tens of thousands of historical vacancies, and written the hub pages that finally gave those businesses a ranking asset that was not a job advert.
We do not promise positions. We agree the rules first, publish against them, and report on applications and client enquiries with the same seriousness. If a page is not earning its place on the board, it is rewritten or retired.
Direct lines
WhatsApp: +8618465139145
Telegram: @bdtg678
Email: hello@webseogrow.com
Send an ATS export or three live advert URLs. We reply with two observations on index coverage before any invoice.