Content is king!
I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase before. Content can help differentiate your services. Position you as a thought-leader. Build stronger client and candidate relationships. Give your sales team something more to talk about (besides just asking prospects “are you hiring?”). Provide fuel for your social media presence. Help improve search engine rankings.
The list goes on and on and on. So yes, content is king.
BUT, and this is a big BUT (no pun intended): It needs to be the right content, and it needs to be used in the right ways. To help…
Here are 3 ways to get more value from your staffing blog:
- Answer questions you frequently get from clients and candidates.
How many times do you answer the same exact question, over and over? While it might get annoying to respond to, it shows that most people have similar questions and they are looking for answers. And that’s really the key “they are looking for answers!” By writing posts that answer specific questions, you can position yourself as a thought-leader. You position your company as a partner to clients and candidates. Writing great blog posts like this can turn you into the “go-to” resource for people. It can also make your day-to-day job so much easier. Instead of fielding the same questions and retyping the same answer over and over, you can document things and direct people back to your blog. It’s a win-win scenario.Where should you start? Ask your recruiters and sales team what questions they hear repeatedly. Start right there. Extract the knowledge from their head and make that public on your blog. Your clients and candidates will find a TON of value there. And so will search engines…
- Make sure every post is search engine optimized.
People use search engines because they are looking for something. Often, they are looking for answers to questions. Once you create a great collection of blog posts that answer specific questions, make sure the content is search engine optimized. Here are some basic tips:- Write titles that are relevant and focused on your audience.
- Include keywords in the title of the post and the URL – but don’t “stuff” them in there.
- Think about how someone would search for this content; write using those terms.
- Build more inbound links (a bit more on that in tip 3 below).
- Make sure you have a custom meta page title and meta page description.
- Make sure you have custom social meta data.
- Use Headlines and Headings (H1, H2, H3 tags.)
- Share inter-site links to other parts of your website and link to your blog post too.
- Use the Staffing SEO tips in our SEO ebook for Staffing Companies (notice the inter-site linking).
- Don’t be a generalist, get specific. We offer SEO for staffing companies. So while this section is about “SEO” I also include the word “staffing” so that we have a better chance of ranking well in search when a staffing company is looking for SEO help. For staffing and recruiting companies, include your geography or industry focus to hone in on the right target audience and rank higher in search.
- Share your content!
This isn’t Field of Dreams. If you build it, they might not come. But don’t wait for people to stumble across your content. Use it in different ways. Here is a starting point:- Create an email newsletter and use the content there. Push it out to your CRM and ATS lists.
- Make sure it’s being indexed by search engines.
- Turn every post into 3+ social media posts. For example, this post can be turned into several different social posts that each highlight one key takeaway and link back to the full post.
- Get everyone on your team to share content and engage with it. Social algorithms reward content that gets engagement – start by getting your team to share!
- Turn great blog posts into printable articles for your sales team. Mail them to clients with a personal letter or use as drop-offs.
- Send one-off emails to prospects with a link just to make sure they saw it.
- Share posts that answer specific questions when someone asks!
- Encourage others to repurpose your content (with credit). Share career blog posts with college placement offices. Share business-focused content with the local business publication. Get associations to repurpose your content on their sites or newsletters. Make sure they link back to the original post on your website – this build extremely valuable inbound links!
- Create Pillar Content. Pillar content is a long-form piece of content (like the Staffing SEO Ebook) that goes into detail. You can either start there and turn the pillar content into a lot of smaller posts (that all link back to the pillar content), or you can write a lot of shorter posts on a topic and combine/repurpose those into a large pillar of content when complete. Search engines and users LOVE long-form content like this.
- Create short personal videos that introduce the blog post and share that to social and with your clients – provide a link back to the website.
Looking to drive sales from your staffing website?
We can help! At Haley Marketing we offer a full-suite of digital marketing services for staffing companies. Whether you need help ghost-writing for your staffing blog, help with your social media marketing efforts, or need assistance with staffing SEO, we can help. Contact us today!
