SEO that brings in clients, not just candidates

SEO for recruitment agencies is the practice of getting an agency's website to rank in search results for two separate audiences at once: hiring companies looking for a recruitment partner, and candidates looking for roles. It combines technical work on job pages and feeds, content built around sectors and disciplines, local SEO for each office, and conversion tracking that measures enquiries and registrations rather than traffic.

Two reasons. First, a recruitment site serves two audiences with opposite intent, and the pages that attract candidates rarely attract clients. Second, job pages create technical problems no other sector has: thousands of URLs appearing and expiring constantly, feeds from a CRM, and JobPosting structured data that has to stay accurate or Google for Jobs drops the listing. A generalist agency will usually optimise for candidate traffic because the volume looks better, and leave the client side untouched.

Technical fixes on job indexing and site speed can show up within four to six weeks. Content and authority work usually takes three to six months to move commercial rankings, and longer on competitive terms where established agencies hold the results. Any agency promising top rankings in weeks is either targeting terms nobody searches for or is not being straight with you.

Both, on separate pages, measured separately. Candidate keywords ('marketing jobs Manchester') drive volume and fill your database. Client keywords ('marketing recruitment agency Manchester') drive revenue. Most agencies accidentally optimise only for candidates because job pages naturally generate more traffic, then wonder why SEO is not producing client enquiries.

Standalone SEO retainers for recruitment agencies typically run £1,000 to £3,000 a month in the UK. At Addictivity, SEO sits inside the Agency Accelerator programme, which starts at £4,000 a month and covers the full marketing engine rather than SEO alone. One-off technical work can be scoped as a fixed project.

Not always. If the site loads reasonably, the job feed indexes, and the content structure can be extended, SEO can work on what is there. A rebuild is worth it when the platform blocks the basics: no control over page titles or URLs, job pages that will not index, or a template that cannot support sector landing pages. We will tell you which situation you are in before you spend anything.

Google for Jobs is the job listings panel that appears at the top of many job searches. Listings appear there when a job page carries valid JobPosting structured data and Google can crawl it. It matters because it sits above the organic results, so an agency whose jobs are absent loses candidate visibility to job boards and to competitors whose feeds are set up correctly.

Yes, and it is one of the biggest untapped wins in recruitment. Each office needs its own location page, its own Google Business Profile, and consistent name, address and phone details across directories. Agencies with four or five branches running a single profile are competing for one location's worth of local visibility instead of five.