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Many of our clients and potential new Superfast Circle members are updating their websites.
This a good idea because your website is your authority presence and storefront online and should be given the special attention it deserves.
It is the first place where people find you after.
- They have been directed from social media, and they Google a question they have.
- Or if they’re chatting to someone about the best recruitment company to work with, they’re given your name.
This is the first time you can have a real impact with someone in a channel you own.
I want to talk to you about how to hone your website and ensure that your homepage is doing everything possible to promote you and your brand.
What Candidates and Clients Are Looking For
First of all, let’s talk about what’s the conversation that’s going on in your candidate or client’s head. We talked a bit about this with your about us page last week. If you haven’t accessed that podcast, you can find it here; accelerating your about us page.
When people land on your website, they’ve got several questions going on in their heads. The first one that might surprise you, because often, they may find you from Google, is– Who are they?
Many recruitment companies have different names; they don’t always have recruitment in their domain name.
They could be called something like Watson Smith, Kennedy and Bowman. We don’t always put who we are and what we do in our domain name.
First, when someone lands on your website, they want to know who you are. Are you a recruitment company? Then they want to see what you do.
What they mean by that is, which particular sector do you serve? Are you the type of recruiter that deals with executive roles? Do you deal with leadership or management roles, or do you deal with apprentices?
Then the conversation moves to, “How can you help me?”
That is something that not everyone communicates on the website.
Then finally, “How good are they?” and “How can I get in contact with them?”
Now, that probably sounds quite logical; you may think that you have all of those areas covered, and my experience of looking at different websites across the web is not everybody ticks all the boxes when it comes to these critical information pieces.
Key Information to Communicate on Your Home Page
Let’s go through the homepage and think about some of the things you might want to be thinking about that are visible to people.
If people land on your website, the first thing is to have your telephone number within easy reach and an email where people can email you. I always think having your social media icons is good because people like to check you out online in today’s interconnected world.
It might surprise you when you look at other websites how few people have their telephone numbers visible, on the navigation bar, at the top of their website.
I am sure you have a Contact Us page or your website’s footer where you have contact details. Now, remember that many people do not have a lot of patience, and if you are not hooking somebody in, in that first third of your website pretty quickly, they’re off, and they’ll go and look elsewhere.
Don’t make it hard for people to find the information they want; obviously, most recruiters we work with want people to pick up the phone and speak to them.
Ensure you have a telephone number on your homepage in the header bar where people land. If you are doing international recruitment, ensure you have the relevant codes if someone’s dialling from abroad.
Ensure you have the best email address for them to contact you. I would also ensure you have your social media icons, depending on your location.
As people scroll down your website, you must have your value proposition. This tells people who you are, who you help, and why you and this is important to have very high up on your website.
Also, what you would ideally have, depending on the markets in which you work in exec search or not, is a job search function.
Here, you can have a button, whatever you want to do, or a search bar, but you must have something that says, “Looking to recruit? Looking for a new role?”
Make it simple, so it’s click, click, click for people, and they can go through and find the information they want.
Simplify Navigation
Depending on your particular website builder, you will often only have just three lines at the side related to the responsiveness of your website.
However, it has been shown, time and time again, that having a full navigation bar helps people navigate to the area they want to access.
Not everyone is super tech-savvy, and it’s really good to have things highlighted, so people can go exactly where they want.
They can find and go to your services page, blog page, and contact us page, all easily visible on your navigation bar.
Make navigation easy for them.
Content is another thing to consider when people are on your website’s home page.
From a design rather than marketing perspective, it is in ‘vogue’ to have websites led by large designs with minimal content.
Yet people need to read who you are and what you deliver, especially when you are a micro or small SME.
A focused paragraph that speaks into the pain that your clients and candidates are going through and how you can help them.
If you want an idea of how that might look, go to our website, which is superfastrecruitment.co.uk, and scroll down the homepage.
Our text highlights exactly who we are and what we do, and if you look at our header banner, a picture of Sharon and me overlaid across is exactly who we work with.
We say, “We help micro and small SME recruitment search and staffing companies globally market their brand and increase placements by providing all the training, consulting, content, and resources they need.”
In a relatively short sentence, state what we do.
Then as you start to scroll down the page, we have what we call a hero bar.
We’re giving some social proof, which is something I’m going to come onto next. You need to have some social proof about who you are and how you help people, so some testimonials, or whom you’ve worked with, and there, we’ve got the fact that we’ve got content published on recruiting blogs, on UK Recruiter on Recruitment Grapevine, Recruitment Agency Expo.
We’re on iTunes, part of the Life Coach School and a TEAM service provider. If you imagine someone lands on a website, they’re looking for some validation about you.
If you’ve got something like that, then absolutely make sure that that is on your homepage. As you scroll down our homepage, we encourage you to download our marketing checklist.
Then, as you go further down our website, we have a big block of text. It works well. Our website ranks on the first page of Google for multiple search terms, and there’s a reason for that, it’s because we have good content, that’s keyword aligned to our market.
Then, what we talk about is our services. Now, this is where you guys need to ensure that you have your services highlighted here and the sectors you serve that need to be on your home page.
Next, have testimonials; you’ll notice we have a scrolling bar. People are looking for social proof in today’s market because they have many choices regarding which recruitment company to work with.
Adding Value and Capturing Names
Next is value add content from your blog, which I hope you have; we will talk about that next week, then have some blogs at the bottom so that people can see, “Oh, some useful content here that I can access.”
People will land on your homepage, and you want them to go and click through to other site areas, but they won’t always email you or pick up the phone immediately.
That’s why it’s great to use a really useful marketing tactic as part of your strategy to build your database.
This is known as an exit intent popup.
Whether you like popups or not, the fact is they work. In a B2B environment, the type of popup that works well only appears when people leave the website.
We have one that we are changing, so I’ll tell you what it is now, but it might have changed by the time you listen to this podcast.
When you go to leave our website, if you haven’t been there before, or it’s been a while since you’ve visited the page, as you go to close the browser, up will pop an opportunity for you to download one of our popular reports.
At the moment, it’s our automation report so you can download that now; it will be something else in a couple of weeks.
Suppose you had something like that popping up on your website as people go to leave. In that case, you stand a chance of grabbing somebody’s name and email address, who then can go into either your candidate or client marketing funnel, and you can start nurturing them to start working with you.
You could put your latest salary survey or a workplace report. You could put something useful for both candidates and clients, and you could get them to tick whether they’re a candidate or client, and then they can go into a different funnel.
Your homepage needs to look good; of course, it does, and it’s the first time people come across you in a more intimate setting, so it needs to work from a marketing perspective to create more demand for your service.
When people land on your website, they must know, “What’s the next thing I need to do?”
That may be to download a report before they leave the website. It might be to grab your phone number. It might be to click through and look at the different services. It might be to register their CV or Resume, something else you can have on your homepage, or to go and visit your job board.
Make sure you’ve got multiple options on your homepage, which can help create that marketing process and move people through to the next stage of their journey as they consider working with you.
Thank
Denise
How We Can Help You With Your Recruitment Website
With our Superfast Circle members as their virtual marketing directors, we support them in creating their website with marketing in mind; if you want to find out how we can help you book a call with us here.
