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How to Double Your Website Traffic
(and Inbound Leads)

3 Steps to Create a Sales Engine

Need more candidates? Or maybe you want more employers contacting you?

It's not hard. If you have a plan.

Give people a reason to visit.

Why would an employer (or job seeker) visit your website? To find jobs? To learn about your company?

That's not enough! What else can you offer?

At Haley Marketing, we monitor Google Analytics on more than 500 staffing and recruiting websites. Some companies get tens of thousands of visitors each month...while others get less than a thousand.

So what's the difference?

  1. Content
  2. Promotion

First, let's look at content. The best staffing websites are filled with information that employers and job seekers would find valuable. This can include:

  • Blog posts
  • eBooks
  • Whitepapers
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Recorded webinars

But what matters isn't the format of the content, it's the information you provide. If your website is only about the services you offer, it's not going to be interesting to most people.

To attract more people to your website, you need to provide information that is useful, relevant, timely and/or entertaining. So what do the best websites offer? Here are a few examples:

And these are just a few examples. The key to great content is to really know your target audience. Understand their problems, pain points and interests. Then produce content that your ideal clients and candidates will find useful.

Optimize your site to maximize conversion.

A great staffing website is designed to get people to take action. Every page has a purpose, and it offers one or more ways for people to respond.

Ideally, your website will get job seekers to apply to jobs and employers to request information about your services. But these aren't the only kinds of actions people can take.

Your website could also encourage people to:

  • Download an article, eBook or eBook
  • Watch an on-demand webinar
  • Request a consultation or resume critique
  • Sign up for job alerts
  • Sign up for a newsletter (or other publication)
  • Request more information about a top candidate
  • Find their nearest local office
  • Chat with you
  • Call now

Those last two ideas are particularly important for mobile site visitors. On mobile, people tend to prefer calling or texting over filling out a form. So if you want to maximize conversion, make it easy for people to connect with you...the way they want to connect.

Offering a variety of ways to respond is important. Driving people to those conversion pages is just as important. The best staffing websites have calls to action on every web page, and they use a variety of formats for those calls to action.

Here are a few examples:

Text Link:
Contact Us Today for More Information

Button:

Graphic:

Take CTAs to the next level with a Fly-Out

Flyout, pop-ups and modal windows are all techniques that can draw more attention your calls to action. One of our clients added an "Apply Now" flyout to the home page of their website, and they saw job applications increase by 71 percent!

Want to see an example of a flyout?

Get people to your site.

Your website is not the "Field of Dreams." If you want more people to visit, you have to promote your content. Here are a few suggestions:

SEO.

Make sure every content-focused page on your site is optimized for search engines. This includes every blog post. Each page should be optimized around the content using keywords that your clients (or candidates) are likely to be searching.

Social Media (free promotion).

Share your content where people will find it.

  • Status Updates. Have every team member share your content as a status update on their personal LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can even automate some of this sharing by feeding content from your website to the social sites (we use Dlvr.IT at Haley Marketing to automate our sharing).
  • Company Pages. Manually share links to your content on your company Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages.
  • LinkedIn Groups. Share blog posts and other content in the groups that serve your target clients and candidates. Ideally, you can have your web developer set up your website so you can share to LinkedIn right from your site.
  • Tweet @key decision makers. Through Twitter, you can share your content directly with local business leaders and influencers in your community.
  • Turn content into images. Most staffing content is text heavy. But if you turn your ideas into pictures, you can make your message more compelling, and you will attract more visitors from Instagram, Facebook and other social sites. Pictures will generate significantly more interest (and clicks) than just words.
  • Create an intro video. Facebook loves video. YouTube is all video. If you have great content to share, make a short promotional video and then share that video on other social sites. Be sure to post a link to the content either in the video or in the post you share.
  • Repurpose long-format content into a series of blog posts. Then share each post on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Use each post to drive people to the original content.
  • Industry discussion groups. If you belong to a chamber of commerce or trade association that has an online discussion forum (like ASA Central), share your content.

Social Media (paid)

Adding some paid distribution to your social media efforts can dramatically increase your reach. For example, with Facebook you can promote your content so it will show up in the news feeds of a highly targeted audience. Just $20 in paid promotion can get your content in front of thousands of people. You can also do paid promotion on LinkedIn (this one is expensive!), Twitter, Instagram and SnapChat.

PPC (remarketing)

Use Google and Facebook remarketing to promote content to people who have visited your website in the past. With remarketing, you design graphic ads that follow people around the internet. While you can create ads that promote your company as a whole, the best remarketing ads offer something of value...like content! With remarketing, your ads will appear on Facebook and millions of other websites that are part of Google's Display Network.

Email

Newsletters. Invitations to events. Top candidate and hot job advertisements. However you use it, email generates the fastest response and highest ROI of all outbound marketing tools. If you're already doing regular email marketing, promote your web content in those emails. If you're not, create emails specifically designed to promote your content.

Think old school

Direct mail. Drop-offs. Voice mail. Every interaction with a client or prospect is an opportunity to promote your content and drive traffic to your website. The more you make people aware of the resources on your site, the more visitors you will get.

Don't forget your job posts

Jobs are the most popular content that a staffing firm can offer. The challenge is to get your jobs in front of more people, more often...without spending a fortune. While you can pay for more posts, or pay to sponsor more jobs, you can use all of the ideas mentioned above to attract more active and passive job seekers to your website.

Three more ideas to increase response from your website.

Okay, let's recap. To improve web traffic and inbound leads, you need to create awesome content, optimize your website to convert more visitors and promote your content to draw people to the site. IF you do these things regularly, you will see a massive increase in traffic and leads.

But don't stop there. Here are three more sophisticated tools to help you get more response from your site:

Landing pages

A landing page is a specialized web page designed to get someone to take an action. Ideally, whenever you create an awesome new piece of content, you will create a landing page to go with it. As an example, see what we do with all our past Lunch with Haley webinars:

Remarketing

We discussed remarketing earlier, but we want to reinforce that remarketing is a low-cost way to stay top-of-mind and drive repeat visitors to your website. One of the things we've learned from tracking analytics for so many staffing companies is that a repeat visitor is more than twice as likely to take action. So rather than investing all your marketing and recruiting efforts into attracting new visitors, budget a few hundred dollars a month to promote your content, ideas and services to people who have visited you before.

Marketing automation

If you are not familiar with marketing automation, it's a tool that allows you to better track and follow up with people who have visited your website or otherwise engaged with your firm. Automation can be used to track repeat website visitors—and notify your sales team when a prospect starts to look interested. It can create and track email campaigns, so you know what is working...and what is not. And it can allow you to convert more website visitors into active sales leads and job candidates.

And if you need help with all this stuff, well, that's why we are here.

From web design to content development, social marketing, SEO, PPC, email and just about any other marketing a staffing firm needs, we're here for you.

Contact Us Today