Technical SEO best practices for recruitment websites

If you believe your site would benefit from stronger technical SEO foundations or would like to learn more about our content optimisation and strategies to help attract more targeted organic search visitors, get in touch with our team today.

What should be considered in a Tech SEO strategy?

Technical SEO is a core part of optimising websites for search engines. Fundamentally, pages should be crawlable and indexable (without errors) for the best chance of ranking. Learn more about these terms here.

Elements of a standard Tech SEO strategy include looking at:

• URL structure
• Internal pages
• Indexability
• Internal links
• Redirects
• H1s
• Page titles and descriptions
• Schema
• Social tags
• Localisation (internationalisation)
• Performance (from a page experience point-of-view)
• Images
• JavaScript
• CSS
• External pages

Content, both on-page and off-page, has the most significant impact when published on a site with strong technical SEO, amplifying its visibility in search engine results.

Technical SEO best practices for recruitment websites

Some technical SEO best practices have a greater impact on your rankings and organic search traffic than others. Let’s look at a few quick wins we focus on when carrying out our tech checks.

1. A relevant, keyword research-led H1 should be placed at the top of a page, and this closely aligns with the page title. Semantically similar terms should be incorporated in H2s and H3s.
2. Be mindful of noindex pages, ensuring they aren’t unintentionally set for pages you want to be crawled and indexed.
3. Internal linking is a powerful strategy for building relevancy across your site’s pages. It’s not just about helping your pages be found. For example, if you reference a recruitment specialism in an industry-specific blog post, internally linking to the relevant page with keyword-focused anchor text helps build content relevance for that page.
4. Schema markup (a type of structured data) offers the opportunity for your pages to appear in Google’s Rich Results. This additional code helps search engines to better understand your content, context and how entities are connected.
5. If you're looking for enhanced visibility of articles, podcasts, or job postings in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), read Google’s search gallery on the schema needed for your site. 
6. Ensuring you get maximum visibility for job postings in Google for Jobs results, our recruitment sites are built with in-depth jobPosting Schema.org markup, including:
   
   • Job title
   • Description
   • Employment type
   • Direct apply
   • Salary
   • Location
   • Remote working conditions (if applicable)
   • Your recruitment organisation and logo structured data fields

How can Tech SEO support my website performance?

In our experience, technical SEO makes up between 20 and 40% of SEO strategy, depending on the website size. Technical SEO can have a greater impact on larger sites with more URLs. The rest of the strategy focuses on content, both on-page and off-page.

Health scores are a crucial part of any tech SEO strategy, serving as a guide for improvements to make your site more search-engine friendly. If a health score is 80%+ (the target for marketing package clients), then optimised content and sometimes link building is required to rank for non-brand terms. Technical SEO alone will only take you so far in achieving your marketing goals.

It's the sum of technical SEO working with content SEO (and laser-targeted keyword research from strategy) that provides better organic search rankings, clicks and – most importantly – candidate and client conversions.