Most recruitment agency websites get a fair amount of search traffic and very few client enquiries from it. When I look at the numbers for a new site, the reason is nearly always the same. Almost all of the traffic is job seekers, the site was built around the job board, and the pages a hiring manager would need barely exist.
SEO for recruitment agencies works best when you plan for candidates and clients separately, whether you run a contingency agency, a staffing business or an executive search firm.
Your website has two audiences who search in very different ways
Candidates and employers both use search engines, but in very different numbers. The table compares the monthly UK searches for a sector's jobs, such as "engineering jobs", with searches for an agency in the same sector, such as "engineering recruitment agency", and what advertisers pay per click for each.
| Sector | Job searches | Agency searches | Cost per click (job / agency) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering | 9,900 | 390 | £0.75 / £7.72 |
| IT | 8,100 | 1,600 | £1.31 / £6.85 |
| Finance | 8,100 | 170 | £1.00 / £12.45 |
| Construction | 6,600 | 720 | £2.54 / £7.68 |
| Legal | 4,400 | 170 | £2.23 / £9.20 |
| Accountancy | 2,400 | 590 | £1.73 / £4.94 |
UK monthly averages from Google Ads data via DataForSEO, October 2026.
Candidates search far more often, in finance nearly fifty times more. Advertisers pay three to twelve times as much for a click from someone looking for an agency, because that person might sign terms and pay a fee.
The candidate searches are also the hardest to win. The first page for "finance jobs" belongs to large job boards with millions of pages and years of links behind them, and a specialist agency will rarely beat them on broad job terms. It is far more realistic to rank for the agency searches, where you are up against other agencies of a similar size.
Some of the people searching "it recruitment agency" are candidates looking for an agency to register with, so the client numbers are a little lower than they look. Pages for clients should speak to hiring managers so plainly that a candidate who lands there knows to head for the jobs section.
All of this means deciding early which pages are for clients and which are for candidates. Your job pages and candidate advice help you fill roles, while sector pages, case studies and market content are what bring in new clients. I'd keep the two apart in the site structure and the keyword plan, and report on them separately too.
Finding the searches your clients make
Client searches in recruitment tend to follow a few patterns:
- A sector plus agency, recruiter or headhunter, such as "construction recruitment agency"
- The same with a location, such as "legal recruitment agency london", which gets 480 searches a month, nearly three times the version without a city
- Seniority or type of hire, such as "executive search firms london" (260 a month) or "interim finance director" (90)
- Questions a hiring manager asks before looking for help, such as how long it takes to hire a finance director or what retained search costs
Most agencies should start with the location searches. They are specific, and far fewer firms compete for them than for the national versions. The question searches have tiny volumes, often ten or twenty a month, but the person asking is often the one who signs the terms.
To find the searches in your own niche, start with Google Search Console, which shows the terms your site already appears for. Type your sector into Google and note the autocomplete suggestions. Then ask your consultants what clients ask on calls, because those questions usually get typed into a search box first.
Before you commit to a keyword, search it and look at who ranks. If the first page is mostly job listings and job boards, Google treats it as a candidate search, however commercial it sounds. "Engineering recruitment" is a good example. It gets 480 searches a month and sounds like something a client would type, but its first page mixes agency homepages with a job board and pages of live engineering jobs. A page aimed only at hiring managers will struggle there, while "engineering recruitment agency" plus a city is a cleaner target.
Build one strong page for each sector you place
The sector page is the most important page on a recruitment website for SEO. It should rank for "[sector] recruitment agency" and its location versions, so put that phrase, with your city if you have one, in the page title and the main heading. It is also the page a hiring manager reads before deciding whether to call.
Most sector pages are a short paragraph about the firm's "extensive experience" followed by a list of job titles. There is very little there for a search engine to rank or for a hiring manager to judge you on. A sector page that ranks and brings in enquiries usually includes:
- The roles you fill and the seniority levels you cover
- Salary or day rate ranges from recent placements
- Typical time to fill, and what tends to slow it down
- The consultant who runs the desk, with a photo and a direct way to contact them
- One or two short case studies, anonymised if needed
- How your fees work, even if you only give a range
Competitors can't copy most of that, and it answers what a hiring manager wants to know before picking up the phone. If you place in several specialisms within a sector, such as tax, audit and payroll within accountancy, each can have its own page once you have enough to say about it.
Location pages
If you have an office, or a desk that covers a particular city, a page for that location makes sense. Trouble starts when an agency publishes a "recruitment agency in [town]" page for forty towns, each a copy of the last with the place name swapped. Google's spam policies describe this as doorway pages, and it can take action against sites that use them.
A location page needs something local to say: the office and the team there, the employers you work with in the area, local salary levels and the sectors you cover. A town you can't write that for is better served by your main sector page.
Fixing job pages
Job pages cause most of the technical problems on recruitment websites. They are created and removed constantly, many are thin (they have little text of their own beyond a job title and a few lines), and they are usually generated by a plugin or platform whose settings nobody has checked since launch.
Job posting markup and Google for Jobs
Google shows job adverts in its own job search panel, usually called Google for Jobs, and has done in the UK since 2018. To appear there, each job page needs JobPosting structured data, often called job posting schema. It is a block of code, invisible to visitors, that tells Google the job title, location, salary and closing date. Most recruitment platforms and job board plugins add it automatically, but the default settings are often wrong in ways that matter:
- The markup belongs on the individual job page, never on job listing or search results pages
- The description in the markup must match the one visible on the page
- Salary should be the range agreed with the client, not an estimate
- If the client wants to stay anonymous, Google's guidance is to set the hiring organisation's name to "confidential"
- A role should only be marked as remote if it is fully remote, and hybrid roles keep their office location
You can test any job page with Google's Rich Results Test, and once the markup is live, Search Console lists any errors across the site in its job postings report.
Expired vacancies
Google accepts three ways to deal with a closed job: set the closing date in the markup to a date in the past, remove the markup, or remove the page so it returns a 404 or 410 status, which tells search engines the page no longer exists. Its documentation warns that leaving expired jobs live and marked up can lead to a manual action against the site.
| Situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Role filled, and other websites link to the page or it still gets visits | Keep the page, say clearly that the role is filled, remove the job markup and link to similar live roles |
| Role filled, with no links and no visits | Remove the page so it returns a 404 or 410 |
| Role still open after its original closing date | Update the closing date in the markup |
| Role reopened | Publish it again with a new posting date |
Don't redirect every expired job to the homepage or the jobs page. Google tends to treat a redirect to an unrelated page as a missing page, so it doesn't keep any of the old page's value.
Too many thin pages
Recruitment sites tend to pile up thousands of pages nobody needs: old vacancies, filter pages for every mix of location and salary, and tag pages nobody visits. They make it harder for Google to work out which pages matter, and they bury the sector pages you want to rank. Search Console's Pages report shows how many URLs Google has found, how many it has indexed (stored and made eligible to appear in results) and why it left the rest out.
If most of the indexed pages are old jobs and filters, deal with those first. Expire old vacancies using the table above, add a noindex tag to filter and search results pages so they stay out of Google, and delete tag pages that have no real content. You may read that all this wastes your crawl budget, meaning how many pages Google will fetch from your site. Google says that only becomes a concern for very large sites, roughly a million pages, so for most agencies the point of tidying up is to make the important pages easier for Google to find and understand.
Posting the same advert on job boards
Posting the same advert on your own site and on several job boards won't get you penalised. Google treats duplicate content as normal and picks one version to show, and it will usually pick the job board because the board has far more authority. If you want your own job pages to rank, give your site's version more detail than the board version, such as the team the person would join, the client's sector, the salary range and the consultant to speak to.
Jobs sections run by a third-party platform
Some agency websites pull their jobs in from recruitment software, so the jobs sit on a different web address or appear a moment after the rest of the page has loaded. Search engines can miss job content shown this way, and Google needs the markup on the same page as the visible description. Paste one of your job URLs into the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and check whether Google can see the job text. If it can't, raise it with your platform provider before you spend money on content.
Google Business Profile and reviews
For an agency with real offices, a Google Business Profile is one of the quickest things to get right in local search. "Recruitment agencies near me" is searched around 49,500 times a month in the UK. Most of those searches come from job seekers, but the map results they see are the same ones a local hiring manager sees.
Google's rules here are strict, and recruitment firms break them often. You can have one profile per real office that is staffed during its opening hours. Virtual offices don't qualify, and a co-working space only counts if it has your signage and your own staff. The profile name must be your actual business name with nothing added, so "Smith Recruitment" is fine and "Smith Recruitment, Accountancy Jobs Leeds" can get the profile suspended. For the primary category, pick the most specific one that fits, such as Employment agency, Executive search firm or Recruiter, and keep extra categories to a minimum.
Reviews affect where you appear in the map results and whether people click. Google doesn't allow you to ask only happy clients or candidates for a review, and it doesn't allow reviews from your own staff. In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has also banned fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews since April 2025. The simplest approach is to ask every candidate you place, and every client after a successful hire, with the same message each time.
Content that brings in hiring managers
Most recruitment blogs are full of CV tips and interview advice. That content attracts candidates, which is fine if you need applicants, but it won't win clients, and it competes with job boards that publish the same articles at far greater scale.
The content hiring managers read is built from what your firm knows from placing people in their sector. The clearest example is the annual salary guide. The salary guides from two of the largest UK recruiters each have links from well over a hundred other websites, according to DataForSEO backlink data from October 2026. A specialist agency can publish a smaller version for its own niche using a year of placement data: salary ranges, how many candidates moved for a pay rise, how long roles took to fill and how often counter-offers were made.
Hiring guides for specific roles also work well, for example what a head of tax costs in Manchester and how long the search usually takes. So do short market updates for your sector, sent to clients by email and published on the site, and plain answers to the questions consultants hear on every client call.
The easiest way to produce this is to interview a consultant for half an hour and write it up for them, because they have the knowledge and rarely the time to write. Our guide to content marketing for recruitment agencies covers planning and formats in more detail.
Getting links from other websites
Links from other relevant websites are still one of the main ways Google judges which agencies to trust, and most recruitment firms have more opportunities than they use. Trade body membership directories often link to their members. Comment for the trade press in your sector, entries for sector awards, and articles in local business news all tend to come with a link. Clients and partners will often link to you from a case study or a supplier page if you ask. A salary guide or market report gives journalists and bloggers a reason to link without being asked.
What AI search means for recruitment SEO
Ofcom estimates that around 30% of UK searches now show an AI Overview above the results. In a US study by Pew Research, people clicked through to a website on 8% of searches that showed an AI summary, compared with 15% of searches that didn't. Some hiring managers now ask an AI assistant to suggest agencies in their sector before they search at all.
The pages that get quoted in those answers tend to be the same pages that rank. Assistants favour pages that are easy to read and contain specific facts, so a sector page with real salary data and a named consultant is more likely to be cited than a page of general claims. Our guide to generative engine optimisation for recruitment agencies goes into this side in more detail.
How long SEO takes and what it costs
The first month or two is mostly fixing what is broken: job markup, expired vacancies, indexing problems and page titles. Rankings rarely move much in that time. Once the sector pages are rewritten or built, impressions (how often your pages appear in search results) usually start to climb in Search Console within a few weeks. Position changes on client searches tend to show from around the third month, and a steady flow of enquiries from search usually builds from month six.
Competition makes a big difference to that timeline. Ahrefs found that fewer than 2% of new pages reach the top ten within a year, but that figure covers every kind of search, including the most competitive. A specialist sector page for one city competes with far fewer rivals than a national job search, which is why agencies usually see results sooner on those terms.
What SEO costs depends on how many sectors and locations you want to cover and how much work your website needs. Whoever you speak to, ask for a breakdown of what the monthly fee pays for, so you can compare quotes properly. If you are rebuilding the website at the same time, our guide to recruitment website costs covers that part.
Measuring what matters
Report on clients and candidates separately, so a rise in job seeker traffic doesn't hide what is happening on the client side:
- In Search Console, filter performance by page folder, for example /jobs/ against /sectors/, so job pages and client pages are counted apart
- In Google Analytics, set up client enquiries and CV submissions as separate key events (what GA4 calls the actions you count as conversions)
- Track rankings for the twenty or thirty client searches that matter most, by sector and location
- Ask every new client how they found you and record the answer in your CRM
The figure to watch is new client enquiries from search, and how many of them become signed terms. If that rises over six to twelve months, the SEO is working, even when total traffic hardly changes.
If you'd like help with any of this, our recruitment SEO service covers the technical work, sector pages and content for agencies and search firms. When we rebuilt the website for Clear Recruitment with SEO built in from the start, their first inbound lead arrived within a week of launch, after a long quiet spell on the old site.
