Recruitment SEO Case Study
A specialist recruitment agency competing nationally — up against the big job boards, aggregators and generalist agencies, all with far bigger budgets.
Recruitment SEO is a two-sided fight. Clients search for an agency. Candidates search for jobs. The work was to own both.
Timeline
A client I've worked with for more than six years. The figures below compare September 2022 with August 2026.
The problem
When we started, the site ranked for plenty of keywords — around 1,800 of them. The catch: almost none sat anywhere that sends traffic. Thirteen keywords in the top three. Visibility on paper, not in practice.
Candidate searches were landing on generic pages rather than pages built for the discipline or location being searched for. And the head terms — the searches a client types when they actually need an agency — belonged to bigger sites.
What I changed
- 1
Funnelling the right keywords to the right pages — discipline by discipline, location by location — so every search lands on a page built to turn it into an enquiry. These are the pages that rank today.
- 2
Pruning. Close to a decade of accumulated content was quietly cannibalising the pages that mattered — including their own job pages. Most of it went: fewer, stronger pages instead of a sprawl of thin ones.
- 3
Getting job listings feeding cleanly into Google Jobs — and the other search engines candidates actually use.
The results
Top-three rankings: 13 to 75.
Page-one rankings: 38 to 244.
Estimated monthly organic visits: roughly 1,400 to 5,700 — up 313%.
Equivalent paid-search value: around £8,000 a month.
Number one for the core recruitment-agency head terms in their sector, and page one for the biggest candidate job searches.
