Open almost any recruitment agency website and the homepage leads with job search. It makes intuitive sense — no candidates, no placements — but it means the site is built for the audience that generates cost rather than revenue, and it competes for that audience against Indeed, Reed, Totaljobs and LinkedIn.
That is an unwinnable fight and an unnecessary one. Candidates are already served by the boards, and most recruiters source far more effectively through LinkedIn outreach than through inbound applications anyway. Meanwhile the client side — the hiring manager searching “recruitment agency for warehouse staff in Poole” — is barely contested at all.
Two audiences, opposite requirements
| What they search | How contested | What it is worth | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Candidates | “warehouse jobs Poole” | Extremely — job boards dominate | Cost, not revenue |
| Hiring managers | “recruitment agency for warehouse staff” | Thin, often no good result | A placement fee |
| Hiring managers | “temp agency near me” | Moderate, local | Repeat business |
| Hiring managers | “how much do recruitment agencies charge” | Almost nobody answers honestly | Pre-qualified enquiry |
The practical change is structural rather than cosmetic. Keep the job board, but give the client side its own navigation, its own set of pages and its own language. A hiring manager should never have to scroll past candidate content to find out whether you handle their sector.
Specialise visibly, or do not bother
“Recruitment agency” as a search term is meaningless — it returns national generalists and tells the searcher nothing. Every query worth having names a sector, a contract type or both: “engineering recruitment agency Dorset”, “temporary healthcare staffing Bournemouth”, “executive search for manufacturing”.
If you genuinely cover four sectors, you need four pages, each written by someone who knows what a shift pattern looks like in that industry. A page that could be about any sector with the nouns swapped will not rank and, more importantly, will not convince a hiring manager who reads it.
Job pages are a technical liability if you get them wrong
Recruitment sites accumulate stale job pages faster than any other sector, and it does real damage. A site with four hundred expired vacancies still returning a live page is telling search engines that most of its content is worthless, and that judgement bleeds into the pages you care about.
- Use JobPosting schema with a validThrough date. This is what makes a vacancy eligible for Google for Jobs, and the date tells Google when to stop showing it.
- Remove or redirect filled roles. Either return a 410, or redirect to the relevant sector page. Leaving them live as “position filled” pages is the worst of the options.
- Do not let job pages outnumber everything else in your sitemap. If they do, exclude expired ones and keep the sitemap honest.
Publish your fee structure
“How much do recruitment agencies charge” is asked constantly and answered evasively by almost everyone. A page that explains the percentage model, where rebate periods typically sit and what changes the rate will pick up that search and start a conversation with a hiring manager who was going to ask anyway.
It also works unusually well in AI answers, because when someone asks an assistant what a recruiter costs, the model needs a page that actually contains numbers. Most of the sector has left that space empty.
What a sensible programme looks like
A client-side section separated from the job board. One properly written page per sector you genuinely serve. A fees page. JobPosting schema and a disciplined process for expiring roles. Then Google Business Profile, correctly categorised as an employment agency, with reviews from hiring managers rather than candidates — a placed candidate’s five-star review is pleasant, but it does not persuade the person with the budget.