Written by Rhys Jones Managing Director – Davidson Gray
Last Updated: 24 September 2025
About the Author: Rhys Jones is the Chairman of Davidson Gray, with over two decades of experience in launching and scaling successful recruitment businesses. As a hands-on partner to recruitment entrepreneurs, Rhys specialises in turning industry expertise into thriving companies. Connect with Rhys on LinkedIn.
Visibility on Google is crucial for any recruitment business
If you’ve read my blog on the top 5 cash-making marketing tips for your recruitment business or listened to my podcast on investing in marketing, you’ll know how crucial I feel it is to ensure your website ranks highly on Google searches.
Simply, if your website isn’t visible, the only people who will see it are the clients and candidates who you are already doing business with – which reduces its value immensely. Whereas, if you can create a website that is optimised for your marketplace, it’s then a great lead generation tool to attract new clients and candidates. Added to that, if either a client or candidate is taking the time to Google a new recruitment company, the odds are they don’t have faith in their current recruiter, so they are ripe for us to sell to.
So, getting your website to the top of Google is one of the biggest challenges for any new business owner, and the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can feel incredibly complex. But, I’ll let you in on a secret: ranking on Google is less about technical tricks and more about something you already have in spades – expertise.
Key Takeaways
- Visibility is Crucial: A recruitment website invisible on Google loses value as a lead generation tool, as most users don’t look past the first page of search results.
- Expertise Over Tricks: Modern SEO prioritizes demonstrating genuine expertise (E-E-A-T) by creating valuable, original content that addresses the audience’s needs.
- Content is King: Build “topical authority” through diverse content like blog posts, salary guides, and market updates to become a go-to source for an entire topic.
- On-Page SEO Matters: Optimise page titles, headings (using a Q&A approach), meta descriptions, image alt tags, and internal links for readability by both Google and humans.
- Digital PR for Backlinks: Acquire high-quality backlinks from authoritative domains by creating valuable content that others want to link to and offering expert commentary to journalists.
- Prepare for AI Search: Optimise for Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) by directly answering questions, showcasing team expertise, and presenting information clearly and concisely.
- PPC as a Short-Term Tool: Paid ads (PPC) offer immediate visibility and data but should complement, not replace, organic SEO, with well-optimised landing pages.
- SEO is a Marathon: Achieving high Google ranking is a continuous process requiring consistent effort and a commitment to serving your audience with genuinely useful content.
Why is ranking on Google important for new recruitment businesses?
Well, it matters for driving new enquiries to your website. If you’re visible in organic search, users will naturally float in your direction. But if you’re not visible (which is the case for most recruitment start-ups, and even established recruitment businesses), nobody new will come your way.
The statistics on this are a little frightening. According to WebFX, only 25 percent of users look past page two in the search engine results pages (SERPs). And Backlinko says that only 0.78 percent of Google users actually click something on the second page.
From this data, the message is clear: it’s critical to be on page one. If you’re not, you may as well be on page one hundred and one.
How to get your recruitment website on page one of Google
There are two main ways to get your content seen on page one of Google: Organically (by having a well optimised website that gives users what they need) or by paying for Google Ads.
Paid can be a valuable way to get some early visibility while your website is still in its early stages and is unlikely to be ranking on page one under its own steam. But, Google Ads can be expensive (very expensive, depending on your market) so it’s important to also have a well optimised site that can rank organically.
So, how do you get Google to show your site on their non-paid rankings (also known as organic search rankings)? Well, it all comes down to good site optimisation. Getting attention is easier said than done, though. Google search is a competitive environment. And so, grabbing the limelight on the platform is notoriously challenging.
Think of it this way: Google’s main job is to provide its users with the most helpful, trustworthy answers from genuine experts. Your website’s job is to prove that’s you. This blog will walk you through the core principles you need to focus on to show Google you’re the best recruiter in your niche.
1. Proving You’re the Expert
Years ago, SEO was all about stuffing your website with keywords. Now, while selecting keywords is still important to position your content in the right audience, it’s about becoming a trusted authority on your subject.
This is what Google calls E-E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In simple terms, it means proving you’re a real expert who knows their stuff. This is where you, as a specialist recruiter, have a massive advantage – talk about the things you know, the things your audience want to read about, and the keywords will come naturally.
Instead of just targeting a keyword like “Legal Jobs Manchester”, think about all the questions a candidate or client in that market is asking. What are their pain points? What advice do they need?
Your goal is to build “topical authority”. You do this by creating content that answers these questions, such as:
- Blog Posts: Write articles like “The 5 Key Skills Every Top Law Firm in Manchester is Hiring For” or “How to Navigate a Counter-Offer in the Legal Sector.”
- Salary Guides: Create a downloadable salary guide for your specific niche. This is an incredibly valuable asset that provides real-world data to your audience.
- Market Updates: Regularly post about hiring trends in your sector.
If you are struggling for the topics and content that works in your market, spend some time on Google and look at what results are coming up under searches you try. Take a look at the ‘People Also Asked’ and ‘AI Overview’ sections of the search, they will show you related questions and topics and help you unearth some great angles for your content.
When you become the go-to source for an entire topic, Google sees you as an authority and will start ranking you for all sorts of related searches, not just the obvious ones. This helps you start creating more varied content that naturally will give you many more chances to appear in relevant searches over stuffing multiple keywords into a single service page.
2. Selecting keywords
This doesn’t mean you should ignore keywords completely. Researching relevant keywords is still good practice and can help better focus your content.
What is a keyword? Keywords are the search language your target audience puts into Google. For example, ‘Legal Recruitment Agency,’ or ‘Construction jobs.’ So, if you add the correct keywords to your site, Google will connect related searches.
In times gone by, you could feasible stuff as many variations of ‘construction jobs manchester’ into your jobs page and end up on page one. Over the past few years, and particularly since the advent of AI search, this approach has become less and less effective.
Now, when looking for the right keywords, think about user intent and relevancy at all times. Think about what the user is expecting to read about when they land on that page as well as what kind of page it is. If it’s a ‘service’ focused page, having a simple keyword like, ‘Construction recruitment Manchester’ may be appropriate, for a blog about interviewing construction workers effectively, adding pointless sections, just to stuff generic keywords adds nothing, and could even turn your audience off.
3. Making Your Website Easy for Google (and Humans) to Read
Once you have great content, you need to make sure it’s presented in a way that’s easy to understand. This is what “On-Page SEO” is all about, and it’s simpler than it sounds.
Page Titles & Headings:
Make them clear and descriptive. A page title like “Financial Services Jobs | Your Recruitment Co.” is much better than just “Jobs”. Use headings (H1, H2, H3) to break up your text and create a logical structure. Look at optimising your headers so sections follow a ‘Q&A’ type approach. For example, rather than have a header that says, ‘Interview Tips’, try , ‘How can you improve your Construction Interviews?’
Meta Descriptions:
This is the short snippet of text that appears under your link in Google’s search results. Think of it as your shop window. Make it compelling and relevant to the page’s content to encourage people to click.
Image Alt Tags:
This is simply a short, written description of an image. It’s used by screen readers for visually impaired users and helps Google understand what the image is about. It’s a small but important detail.
Use Internal Links:
These are the hyperlinks you have on one of your site’s pages that links to another page. Why are they of value? Google’s indexing bots (called site crawlers), use internal links to determine the priority pages on your site and help link relevant topics together, increasing their value and visibility.
When creating internal links, it’s important to optimise them. Rather than highlight a single word with a link, use an appropriate phrase that describes the content of the link. For example, rather than writing, “read more about our services here,” put, “read more about our specialist procurement recruitment services in the UK.” The latter example will be much more useful to both the Google bots, but it will also help to re-enforce to your visitors what you do.
Schema and markup:
This is a bit of an advanced one and best left to the professionals (if you are lucky enough to have a web developer creating your site). Schema is code that sits behind your web pages telling the Google bots what kind of page it is and signposting other crucial bits of info that will help your site rank.
For example, adding Q&A markup to a blog could be a great way of signalling to Google there is information they can use for a featured snippet or an AI Overview. Or, if your pages include videos, adding this schema can help Google be able to ‘see’ the video and include it in its calculation of the value of that page. Don’t get too hung up on schema – many platforms will even automatically add schema to your page if you use certain blocks or page types on your web site, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind.
4. Building your reputation with ‘Digital PR’ (The new Backlinks)
A “backlink” is simply a link from another website to yours. Google sees these as votes of confidence. The more high-quality, relevant websites that link to you, the more trustworthy your site appears.
Forget about old-school tactics of asking random websites for links. In 2025, it’s all about “Digital PR”, or to put it more simply, creating things that people want to talk about and link to.
That salary guide I mentioned earlier? That’s a perfect example. When you create something valuable and original, other industry blogs, news sites, and even universities will want to reference it. This earns you powerful, natural backlinks that Google loves. You can also offer expert commentary on industry news to journalists, who will often link back to your website.
In the past, recruitment agencies would just pay marketing outfits to spam links to their site from any domain they could find. It was great for boosting ranking. But it was also a crappy strategy. Google cottoned onto it fast and soon updated its algorithms. From that moment on, any company caught using illicit methods to generate backlinks put it itself at risk of punishment. You could find your site on page one on Monday and down on page ten on Tuesday.
When it comes to backlinks, you must obey two rules:
- Obtain links from high-authority domains.
- Make sure the linking domain is relevant.
What do I mean by this? Well, it’s pretty straightforward. A high domain authority site is one that everyone knows about. So, for instance, BBC.co.uk or CNN.com do well here because Google considers them to be fonts of knowledge, wisdom and truth. (Your opinion on that subject may differ).
Don’t know whether inbound links have authority? Fear not, Moz has a pretty cool tool you can use. Just paste the URL into the bar and it’ll spit back an authority rating out of 100. Obviously, the higher the rating, the more domain authority the site has (and the more you’ll want to target it for links).
Getting natural-looking links is also essential. Any sites that link to yours must relate to it in a way that makes sense to Google’s bots and manual auditors. They must offer some kind of value to users.
So, if have a link from a lipstick site or car dealership, Google won’t rate it – unless you are a specialist recruiter in this sector! Sites of natural value to a recruitment site are recruitment related sites, that could be other recruitment companies, recruitment CRM businesses, or even a CV writing site. Google bots are extremely good at associating related terms, so it will know CVs are relevant to recruitment, as would be psychometric testing etc.
5. Getting Ready for AI Search
The way people search is changing. AI-powered search engines (like Google’s new SGE) are now providing direct answers to users’ questions, often pulling information straight from websites. Your job is to be the source of those answers.
Here’s how to optimise for this new reality, known as Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO):
- Answer Questions Directly: Structure some of your content in a clear question-and-answer format. Adding an FAQ section to your key pages is a fantastic way to do this.
- Showcase Your Experts: Make sure your “About Us” page is detailed. Have clear bios for you and your team that highlight your experience. This tells AI search engines that the information on your site comes from real, credible people.
- Be Clear and Concise: AI prefers information that is easy to digest. Use bullet points, clear headings, and get straight to the point in your content.
A quick word on paid ads (PPC)
Paid ads, or Pay-Per-Click (PPC), are the sponsored results you see at the top of Google. They are a great way to get immediate traffic and test which keywords convert best.
My advice is to see PPC as a short-term tool. It can be a fantastic way to “buy data” and get your brand seen while your long-term SEO strategy starts to build momentum. However, it’s crucial to have a well-optimised website first. There’s no point paying for clicks if the visitors land on a page that isn’t optimised, helpful, or relevant to the keywords you are sponsoring – that’s just wasting money.
PPC can be expensive too. And, if you don’t have a good PPC Manager, you can risk wasting a lot of money this way. A good PPC Manager will ensure you are spending your money wisely on keywords and phrases that are likely to get you the highest number of people converting.
Don’t misinterpret this as me being against PPC – far from it. If done well, it’s another string to your marketing bow. But, it’s not the easy fix some may lead you to believe. If you are looking at PPC as an option, you may want to read my blog on how much it costs to start a recruitment business and how to plan for your costs.
Conclusion: It’s a marathon, not a sprint
At the end of the day, you need to understand that a website’s true value is the business it attracts, and a lot of that depends on how visible it is on Google. You could have a fantastic looking website, but if nobody is seeing it due to your poor ranking, you’ll get very little value from it. As such, you need to do everything in your power to get a high ranking, ideally on page one, but no further down than page 2 of Google. The advice above should help you do this.
Getting to the top of Google doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a consistent effort to prove you are a leading voice in your field. But the good news is that the strategy is simple: create valuable content, share your expertise generously, and build a site that is genuinely useful for your clients and candidates.
When you focus on helping your audience, Google will reward you for it.
Rhys Jones
Written by Rhys Jones Managing Director – Davidson Gray
Interested in working with Rhys to grow your start up?
Rhys not only provides the start-up infrastructure for your new business and all the support services your business will need, he can actually work with you to grow it. Take advantage of as much mentoring and coaching as you would like, plus Rhys considers himself a working partner and will take responsibility for the areas that you’d like him to. When working together on the business’s growth strategy, much of the effort to deliver it can be delegated to the Davidson Gray team.
