SEO for recruitment agencies that need both sides of the market

Two audiences, one domain, and the split that has to happen first

A recruitment agency sells to employers and recruits from candidates, and the two groups want opposite things from the same website. Employers want to know your sectors, your process, your fee model and your time-to-fill. Candidates want jobs, salary information and a way to send a CV.

Volume is wildly asymmetric. Candidate queries in India are enormous; employer queries are a rounding error next to them. Build one undifferentiated site and candidate content takes the internal linking, the crawl budget and Google's topical read of the domain, leaving your employer pages in a corner nobody visits.

Unlike a staffing firm, you can't simply give up the candidate side — a recruitment agency's inventory is people, and organic candidate flow has real value. So the answer isn't removal. It's a clean structural separation.

1. Two entry points above the fold. 'Hire talent' and 'Find a job', visually equal, from the homepage and from every template. This single change fixes more misrouted enquiries than any keyword work.
2. Two directory trees. /employers/ and /jobs/, with distinct navigation. Cross-linking between the two should be deliberate and minimal, not automatic.
3. Two content programmes. Hiring guides, salary benchmarks and market reports on the employer side. Interview preparation, CV advice and role explainers on the candidate side. Don't mix them in one blog.
4. Two conversion definitions in analytics. Employer enquiries and candidate applications, counted separately, with one headline number that only counts the first. Our note on setting an SEO baseline explains why this has to be settled before work starts.
5. One brand, one domain. Resist the urge to spin the job board onto a subdomain unless it's a genuinely separate product. You'd be splitting authority to solve a problem that navigation and measurement solve better.

The expiry trap: what to do with a job page after the role closes

This is the problem unique to recruitment, and the one most agencies never address. You publish 60 roles a month, each live for four to eight weeks. Within a year you have several thousand URLs, most of them dead, all of them once indexed.

Two failure modes dominate. The first is doing nothing: expired jobs stay live and indexed, so a candidate clicks through from Google and applies for a role filled in March. Google's job posting documentation is explicit that expired postings must be removed. The second is over-correcting — redirecting every closed job to the homepage or the jobs index, which Google reads as a soft 404 pattern and which helps nobody who lands on it.

The documented options are narrower than people assume, and any of them is fine as long as you actually pick one.

JobPosting schema, and what it does and doesn't get you

Structured data on job pages is worth doing properly and is routinely half-implemented. Google's job experience reads JobPosting markup, and the required properties are the entry ticket — title, description, datePosted, hiringOrganization, jobLocation, and validThrough for anything with an end date.

Two things before you budget for it. This surface has changed more than once and varies by country, so check the current documentation and your own Search Console job posting report rather than a blog post from three years ago. And the markup must describe a real, currently open role: marking up an expired posting, or a page that isn't a job at all, is the kind of mismatch that draws a structured data manual action.

• Use the real employer as `hiringOrganization` where you're permitted to name them. Where the client is confidential, be accurate about what you can say rather than inventing a placeholder that misrepresents the role.
• Include salary as `baseSalary` when you have it, with the currency and the period. A range is fine. In Indian recruitment this is the single most common missing property and the one candidates filter on.
• Set `jobLocationType` correctly for remote roles and don't fake a city to catch location searches. It's a misrepresentation and it produces applications you'll have to reject.
• Keep a separate job sitemap so you can see that section's indexing behaviour without it hiding inside the site-wide numbers.
• Don't mark up a category or listing page as a `JobPosting`. One posting, one page, one markup block.
• Check the Search Console job posting report weekly. Errors arrive in bulk because the pages are generated in bulk, and one template bug takes out the whole section.

Where a specialist agency beats the job boards

You are not going to outrank the large job boards for jobs in bangalore or software engineer jobs. They have the domain strength, the inventory and a decade of brand search. Attempting it burns a year.

What they do badly is depth on a narrow slice. A board optimises for breadth across every function in every city. A specialist agency can write the page that actually answers one specific search — and there are far more of those searches than there are head terms.

• Role plus city plus qualifier. clinical research associate jobs in ahmedabad, plant HR manager jobs in coimbatore, SAP FICO consultant jobs pune. Thin on the boards, winnable with a genuine page.
• Employer-side long tail, which is the higher-value half: recruitment agency for pharma in hyderabad, executive search firm for CFO roles india, hiring partner for GCC ramp up bangalore.
• Role explainer content. What a role actually does, what the career ladder looks like, what qualifications matter. Boards list; they don't explain.
• Sector market reports. Hiring trends in a function you genuinely place in, written from what you see across your own client base and clearly labelled as your observation rather than presented as research you didn't do.
• Interview content for your specific sectors — what a BFSI collections interview covers, what a GCC technical loop looks like. Generic interview tips are saturated; sector-specific ones aren't.

Salary guides: the one asset worth building properly

Salary data is the most-linked content type in recruitment, in every market. Journalists cite it, candidates share it, and hiring managers use it in internal budget arguments — exactly the moment you want your name in front of them.

It's also where the industry does its most casual inventing: numbers assembled from three other salary guides and a guess, published under a confident title. Beyond the honesty problem, an unsourced guide is trivially challenged, and the challenge is what people remember. You have real data — the offers you've made, the compensation you've negotiated, the ranges your clients budget. Publish that, and publish its limits.

• State the sample. How many placements or offers, over what period, in which sectors and cities. A guide built on 180 placements in one function is more credible than a national guide built on nothing.
• Give ranges, not points, and say what moves a candidate within the range — years, product exposure, tier of the previous employer, notice period.
• Segment by city. Compensation for the same role differs substantially between metros and tier-2 cities, and a national average serves nobody.
• Date it and repeat it annually. The second edition is what makes it an asset; a one-off guide from 2024 becomes a liability.
• Where you're extrapolating, say so. 'We placed 12 roles in this band, so treat it as indicative' is more persuasive than false precision, and it's the only version you can defend.
• Keep it on one permanent URL updated each year, rather than a new page per edition that splits the links you spent a year earning.

Executive search, brand defence, and what we guarantee

If you do retained executive search, the calculation changes again. Query volume is tiny — a handful of people a month search retained executive search firm india — and the decision runs on reputation and network. SEO's job is narrower and still worth doing: hold the function and sector queries, and make sure that when a board member searches your firm's name, your own pages answer them rather than a stale directory listing.

Brand defence matters more than it sounds. Candidates search <your firm> reviews and <your firm> genuine or fake before sending a CV, because recruitment has a fraud problem in India and people are right to check. A clear page on how you work — that you never charge candidates a fee, what your process is, how to verify a genuine approach from your team — protects your candidate flow and your brand at once.

Our SEO starts at ₹75,000 a month, with smaller regional firms from ₹40,000, ex-GST and month-to-month after the first quarter. Recruitment usually sits above the entry point because the technical work on the job section — expiry automation, schema, sitemaps — runs alongside the employer-side content programme. Full numbers on pricing.

The baseline we freeze on day one is your trailing-90-day count of qualified employer enquiries from organic search: new job orders and genuine client enquiries in your CRM. Not sessions, and not candidate applications, both of which we could double in six weeks without earning you a rupee. Miss it in 90 days and we keep working free until we beat it. We never promise a specific ranking position, because nobody controls Google's index. Three clients a month is what makes that a real commitment.