Recruitment websites break the assumptions most SEO work is built on. A generalist agency applying a sound, conventional approach will often produce disappointing results — not through incompetence, but because recruitment has a structural problem that standard playbooks do not contain a chapter for.
Understanding that problem is worth your time whether you end up hiring a specialist or not, because it also tells you what to ask of whoever you appoint.
The Problem: Your Best Pages Keep Dying
Most SEO assumes a reasonably stable site. You build good pages, they accumulate authority, they rank, they keep ranking. The work compounds.
A recruitment site does the opposite. Your job pages — the pages carrying the keywords candidates actually search, the ones with genuine commercial intent — expire. A vacancy is live for a few weeks and then it is filled, and you are left with a page describing a job nobody can apply for.
So the content most capable of ranking has a lifespan measured in weeks, and you have hundreds of them turning over constantly. Every conventional instinct about building page authority over time runs straight into that.
This single fact generates most of what follows.
What Generalists Typically Get Wrong
They treat expired jobs as a content problem rather than an architecture one. The common advice — write more blog content, build authority to the homepage — is not wrong, it is just answering a different question. It does nothing about the thousands of expiring URLs that are the actual structural issue.
They leave expired jobs live, or delete them all. Both are mistakes. Leaving a filled vacancy indexed creates a bad experience and a page Google will eventually treat as low quality. Deleting it produces a 404 and throws away whatever signals it earned. The right answer depends on whether the role recurs, and requires a rule, not a reflex.
They under-use the sector and location pages. The durable ranking opportunity for a recruitment agency is not the individual vacancy — it is the evergreen page for "warehouse jobs in Leeds" or "finance recruitment Manchester" that persists while the vacancies beneath it rotate. Generalists often build a handful of these and treat them as secondary, when they should be the backbone.
They skip job posting structured data, or implement it wrongly. Google has a dedicated job experience, and getting into it requires correct structured data with accurate validity dates, plus removing the markup when a role closes. This is detailed, rules-bound work and it is easy to do badly in a way that produces errors rather than visibility.
They do not ask about the ATS. A recruitment site's job pages are usually generated by a third-party system, which means page titles, URL structures, meta descriptions and markup may not be yours to control. An SEO plan written as though you control your templates will collapse on contact with the integration. This is the single most common reason recruitment SEO projects stall.
They optimise for candidates and forget clients. Recruitment has two audiences and only one of them searches for jobs. Hiring managers search for "recruitment agency for X in Y", and that is where the revenue is. A strategy weighted entirely towards candidate volume can increase traffic substantially while placements stay flat.
Mobile Is Not Optional Here
Candidate traffic skews heavily towards mobile, and job searching is something people do in gaps — commuting, breaks, evenings. That raises the stakes on things a desktop review will not surface.
The practical checks: can someone complete an application on a phone without a desktop, does a CV upload work from a phone's file picker and from cloud storage, how many steps are there between seeing a job and applying, and does the application survive an interruption. A three-page form that loses its contents when a call comes in is costing you applications invisibly, because the people it fails never contact you to complain.
This is a conversion problem rather than a ranking one, but it determines whether ranking is worth anything. Our wider guide to SEO for recruitment agencies covers the rest of that picture.
What a Specialist Should Actually Bring
Not magic, and not better keyword research. Three specific things.
A rule for expiring jobs. Recurring roles get a persistent page that is refreshed rather than recreated. Genuinely one-off roles get removed and redirected somewhere useful — the relevant sector or location page, not the homepage. Either way the decision is systematic, applied automatically, and does not rely on anyone remembering.
An architecture built around what persists. Sector, discipline, location and seniority pages as the permanent structure, with vacancies as the rotating content beneath them. This is the part that compounds.
A working relationship with your ATS integration. Knowing which fields are controllable, what structured data the system emits, and what has to be solved in the website layer rather than the job feed.
If someone pitching you cannot discuss those three, their recruitment experience is probably one client they inherited.
When a Generalist Is Fine
Worth saying, because "hire a specialist" is self-serving advice from anyone in this industry.
A generalist agency is perfectly capable if two things are true: they are willing to learn your sector's constraints quickly, and you have someone internally who understands the recruitment side well enough to catch a plan that will not survive the ATS. Plenty of good generalist agencies do excellent work in sectors they did not start in, because the fundamentals of technical SEO and content quality transfer.
What you cannot afford is an agency that does not know what it does not know — one that proposes a content calendar and a link building target without ever asking how your job feed works. The question that separates them is simple and you can ask it in the first call: what do you do with our expired jobs? An agency with recruitment experience will have an opinion immediately. An agency without one will tell you they will look into it, which is at least honest.
The same logic applies to the broader choice between an agency, a freelancer and an in-house hire — we've gone through that in SEO agency vs freelancer, and the general questions worth asking are in choosing an SEO agency.
Setting Expectations on Timescales
Recruitment SEO tends to show a particular pattern, and knowing it prevents a premature verdict.
Fixing the expired-job handling and the structured data usually produces early movement, because it removes a drag on the whole site. Building sector and location pages into genuine ranking assets is slower, since those pages have to earn authority like any other commercial page. The client-side terms — the ones hiring managers search — are frequently the most competitive and the slowest, and also the most valuable.
The trap is judging the work on candidate traffic, which is the easiest number to move and the least connected to revenue. If you measure only sessions, you will conclude it is working long before it is, and you will have no way to tell which half of the strategy earned the result. Our piece on how long SEO takes covers the general shape of this.
If you want a view on your own site, our SEO services team is happy to look at how your job feed and site structure interact before you commit to anything — that interaction is usually where the answer lives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do generalist SEO agencies struggle with recruitment websites?
Because recruitment breaks the assumption that good pages accumulate authority over time. Job pages carry the strongest commercial intent and expire within weeks, so a site has hundreds of URLs turning over constantly. Standard playbooks do not address that, and the usual advice to build more content does not solve it.
Should recruiters use a specialist SEO agency?
Not necessarily. A generalist works if they engage with your sector's constraints and you have someone internally who can spot a plan that will not survive your ATS. What matters is whether they ask how your job feed works — if they propose a content plan without raising expired jobs, that is the warning sign.
What should happen to expired job pages?
Apply a rule rather than a reflex. Recurring roles keep a persistent page that gets refreshed; genuinely one-off roles are removed and redirected to the relevant sector or location page rather than the homepage. Leaving filled vacancies indexed and deleting everything are both wrong.
How do I set up SEO for a new recruitment agency website?
Build the permanent structure first — sector, discipline, location and seniority pages — and treat vacancies as rotating content beneath it. Establish the expired-job rule and job posting structured data at launch, and confirm early which fields your ATS integration actually lets you control.
How long does recruitment SEO take to work?
Technical fixes to expired-job handling and structured data often move things early, because they lift a drag on the whole site. Sector and location pages take longer, and the client-side terms hiring managers search are usually the slowest and most competitive. Judge it on placements and client enquiries, not candidate sessions.