A recruitment website is doing two jobs for two audiences who want completely different things, and on most sites only one of them is being served by search.
Candidates get the job board. Employers get a page headed employers. One of those has hundreds of URLs behind it and the other has three paragraphs, and the second one is where your fees come from. That imbalance is the thing I’d look at first.
What happens to a job page once the role is filled
Job pages can earn real search traffic, because somebody looking for a specific role in a specific place is searching for exactly that. But a job board is also the fastest way to accumulate a large number of pages that expire, which is a technical problem most agency sites aren’t set up to handle.
Three things go wrong repeatedly. Filled roles stay live and crawlable, so search engines keep finding dead ends. Expired roles get removed abruptly, leaving errors where there used to be pages. Or every filter combination generates its own URL, and one job board turns into thousands of near-identical pages.
Google publishes structured data guidance for job postings, including how expired roles should be handled. Whether Google’s job experience appears for your searches is worth checking directly instead of assuming, but the underlying housekeeping is worth doing either way, because it’s the difference between a job board that helps the site and one that quietly drags on it.
The client side is usually the thin bit
An employer deciding which agency to brief is choosing a company. They want to know what you recruit for, how you work, what you charge, what happens if a placement doesn’t stay, and whether you know their sector well enough to be useful.
On most agency sites that’s one page. Sometimes it’s a page that mostly describes the candidate experience.
What earns visibility here is the sector knowledge you already have and don’t publish. What roles are hard to fill right now and why. What a realistic salary looks like for a particular role in a particular place. What a client gets wrong in a brief that costs them the hire. Salary information in particular is searched for by both sides of the market, and it’s one of the few things an agency can write with genuine authority. If you publish figures, date them and keep them current.
Where a smaller agency has the advantage
A generalist agency competing for broad recruitment terms is up against job boards, national agencies and aggregators who hold more of everything.
What’s left open is the combination nobody else has bothered with: a discipline, a sector and a place. An employer searching that precisely already knows what they want, which makes them worth more to you than ten people searching something broad.
If your agency covers one or two verticals properly, say so everywhere and build the site around it. A site organised around every sector you’d take a call about reads as a site with no particular expertise in any of them.
Where I’d start
The order depends on what’s already broken. If the job board is generating errors, the enquiry form fails, or nobody can tell which client enquiries came from search, that’s first. No amount of content compensates for a site that can’t be crawled properly.
After that, roughly:
- Which side of the market you need more of. Most agencies have plenty of one and not enough of the other, and the answer changes everything below it.
- The job board housekeeping, covering expired roles, filter URLs and whether your postings carry correct structured data.
- The client pages, expanded from a single employers page into something that answers what an employer is actually weighing up.
- The measurement, separating candidate traffic from client traffic, because a rising total can hide a falling one.
That isn’t a fixed sequence. If you already get client enquiries but can’t source the candidates to fill them, the order reverses.
Would Google Ads help?
Sometimes, and usually on the client side, not the candidate side. Candidate attraction has cheaper channels and job boards you’re probably already paying for. Employer terms are narrower and the value of one retained client can justify the cost.
The number that decides it is what a retained client is worth over a year, not what a single placement pays, and that changes the maths considerably. Get that figure straight before setting a budget. There’s more on my Google Ads service page.
What about AI answers?
Employers do ask assistants which agencies to consider for a particular kind of hire, and candidates ask about salaries and how agencies work. Those answers get assembled from whatever’s readable.
Worth checking before you buy a package for it. Ask a few of them how an employer in your sector would choose a recruiter, run it more than once because the answers move, and note whether you appear and whether what’s said is accurate. Where an agency is missing, it’s usually because nothing online states plainly what it recruits for and where. There’s more under AI search visibility.
Who this suits
Specialist agencies in one or two disciplines who aren’t yet visible for the searches their clients use.
Regional agencies where the town matters to both sides of the market and the site doesn’t reflect it. Nearby towns are on the locations page.
Agencies with a large job board that’s growing faster than anybody is maintaining it.
What does it cost to work together?
I can’t price this from a sector name. It depends on the state of the site, how big the job board is and what turns out to be wrong with it. I’d look at the site, whatever you can share from Search Console, and the agencies you’re losing briefs to. Then I’d tell you what I’d do first, why, and what it would cost.
Most of the work happens remotely, and I’m near Liverpool if a conversation in person would help.
Questions people ask
Should job pages be indexed at all?
Generally yes, for the roles worth being found for. Indexing them is rarely the problem. What goes wrong is what happens when the role is filled, so handle that deliberately rather than leaving it to whatever the job board software does by default.
What structured data do job postings need?
Google publishes a JobPosting specification covering the fields and how expired roles should be treated. Whether the job experience shows for your searches is worth checking in the live results, but valid markup and clean expiry are worth having regardless.
How do I get found by clients rather than candidates?
By writing for them. Sector-specific pages, salary information you can stand behind, and a clear account of how you work and what it costs. Most agency sites have hundreds of candidate pages and one client page, which is why the traffic is shaped the way it is.
Is our filter system causing problems?
It might be. Faceted job search can generate large numbers of crawlable, near-identical URLs. Whether that’s currently a problem for you is visible in Search Console’s page indexing report.
Do you work with agencies outside the North West?
Yes. The work is almost entirely remote and most clients are elsewhere in the country. Recruitment has its own page here because the two-audience problem is specific to it, not because location matters to the work.
Start with an assessment
Tell me which side of the market you need more of and what you recruit for. I’ll look at the site, the job board and the live results for the briefs you want, then tell you where I think the first useful change is. You can request a free assessment or get in touch. Other sectors are on the industries page.