Recruitment sites tend to struggle in search, and it’s usually the job listings doing it. Hundreds of pages carrying a description that also sits on Indeed and four competitors’ sites, most of them filled or expired within six weeks. Google doesn’t have much use for pages like that, and they crowd out the ones you want it reading.
All of it is fixable, and most of it isn’t where recruitment sites usually get worked on.
Recruitment sites tend to have the same four problems, and none of them are fixed by writing better page titles. They’re structural, which is why they persist even on sites that have had SEO work done before.
The description on your vacancy page is usually the client's, and it's on Indeed, Reed and any competitor working the same role. Google picks one version to show and drops the rest. It's rarely yours.
A vacancy might be live for four weeks. Getting a new page indexed and ranked takes longer than that, so much of your site never gets its chance. Then the role is filled, and what happens to the page matters as much as what was on it.
Filter by sector, location, salary and contract type, and every combination can generate its own URL. A few hundred vacancies becomes tens of thousands of near-identical pages, and Google spends its time on those instead of the pages you want it reading.
Candidates and clients search for completely different things. A hiring manager looking for an engineering recruiter needs a different page from a candidate looking for an engineering job, but most sites point both at the job board.
First we find out how many pages your site actually has, and how many of those are filter combinations or roles that closed months ago. On a site with hundreds of live vacancies, that count can run into thousands. It usually explains the rest.
Then we agree what gets indexed. Some recruitment firms are better off keeping vacancy pages out of Google and putting the effort into sector pages that don't expire. Others have the authority to rank them, in which case the roles you fill repeatedly are not only worth writing as job adverts (not job specs) but also with SEO in mind.
Your sector and specialism pages can rank for years, and they're often the most neglected content on the site. A page on recruiting DevOps engineers has to be worth reading: what the market pays, how long roles take to fill, where the shortage is. That knowledge sits with your consultants, not with us. Our job is getting it out of them and onto the page.
We wouldn't generate pages at scale to cover more ground. Twenty pages you'd be happy to show a client will beat two hundred with the place name swapped, which mostly compete with each other.
We also wouldn't promise this moves quickly. The technical work can show up inside a few months, and the content takes longer.
Hiring managers have started asking AI tools the questions they used to type into Google. What does a Technical Superintendent cost right now, how long does an engineering role take to fill, who recruits in this sector. The tool reads a handful of sources and writes an answer, sometimes naming where it came from.
Your job listings won’t be one of those sources. They’re duplicated, they expire, and there’s nothing in them worth quoting. Your sector pages can be, which is the same reason they’re worth building for search – one piece of work with two payoffs.
Despite what some will say, the traffic from this is small at the moment. What matters is being in the answer when someone asks who recruits in your sector, and that takes the same months of work as ranking does.
We’ve written more on how this works in our plain guide to GEO.
Often not, though it depends on your authority and how many candidates find you through search. If vacancy pages are expiring before they rank, they’re taking crawl budget from pages that could rank for years. We’d audit before recommending either way.
No. Indexing controls sit alongside the feed rather than in it, so vacancies still publish and applications still land where they should. We test on a small set before applying anything site-wide.
For most job titles, no, and it’s not a good use of your budget to try. The boards have the authority and the volume. What you can win is the sector and specialism searches a hiring manager runs when they’re choosing who to brief, which is where your clients come from anyway.
The technical work can show up within a few months, because it’s removing a constraint rather than building authority. Sector content takes longer, usually six to twelve months before it’s earning enquiries on its own. Recruitment is competitive and the sites you’re up against have been publishing for years.
They can, and you’ll find competitors ranking with them. What separates the ones that work from the ones that don’t is whether there’s anything on the page. A location and sector you genuinely recruit in, with local salary ranges, the roles that are hard to fill there and the clients you place into, is a real page and can rank for years. Forty pages with the town name swapped is a different thing, and on a site without much authority behind it that version tends to lose to your other pages – something we’ve witnessed on multiple websites.
The map pack is a separate question, and that one is won through your Google Business Profile rather than through a page.
Almost certainly, and often we do. Recruitment sites are frequently built on a specialist platform with an integrated job board, so some changes go through your provider rather than through us. We’re used to writing the spec and following it up.
We also design and build SEO-ready recruitment sites. So if your platform is one of the few with poor SEO baked in, a new site may offer a way forward and the perfect foundation for our ongoing SEO work.
We’d worked with agencies before, but this felt different — clear strategy, honest advice and steady progress we could actually see. Their structured SEO approach has given us far more confidence in our online visibility.”
Operations Director - Consultancy
