In a recent post I discussed the failure of most staffing company websites to offer sufficient content to get listed high in search engine rankings (SERPS).
The article touched on issues like proper URL naming and the importance of separate pages.
This advice was all well and good because if you don’t have good content, you won’t get good SERPS. But if you want to rank with the pros on more competitive searches, then good content is not enough just like a healthy diet isn’t enough to help you win an Olympic medal.
So what more do you need to do to get that coveted #1 or #2 rank?
Many things, but in this post I’m just going to focus on how to strengthen the most important differentiator: good links from highly reliable, relevant sites.
You might question the importance of links but I assure you the search engines don’t, and if you think about it for a minute without links that point to your site, how is anyone searching ever going to get there?
Here are three link building exercises that you can pursue:
- Buy links. This one is obviously going to cost you money but it can be the most direct way to improve your rankings. Buying links is no simple matter however because there are a lot of link-selling hucksters out there and the quality and price of the links being offered varies widely. Consider that a Google search of link building services yields more than 54 million hits and choosing between them can be as complicated as arranging any other technology or marketing purchase. My advice: find a local SEO expert you trust and pay him/her to do it.
- Write articles. Search engines love content, and getting a nicely written article about your market is a key to exposure. You can submit the article in many places like Wikipedia or Ezinearticles. Best of all, you can use and reuse a well written article. It can make for better newsletter. It can be attached to emails to prospects as a lead-nurturing tactic. And you might succeed in getting it republished in local business webzines as well. Every link back to your site embedded in your published article offers a chance for a search engine to find it and thus increase your site’s credibility and thus its SERPs.
- Press releases. Although there are free press release services, Google News tends to regard paid press releases like those issued by PRWeb much higher. Don’t issue a lame press release such as “Acme Staffing Services announced today that it is the leading provider of quality industrial services in Chattanooga”. Make it something with news value. Chronicle a Horatio Alger story you helped create. Describe some crisis that occurred and how you helped provide the people that resolved it.
These are standard tactics you can quickly employ to improve your search rankings.
If you focus enough on your niche and target search terms that aren’t overly competitive, then you might well find them sufficient to get your site at or near the top of SERPs.
On the other hand, if you are targeting highly competitive terms like “call center” on a national scale, then you need to pursue a much more aggressive plan (read: hire me).
But for most staffing companies, getting that rank up can happen easily if you focus on your market. That means candidates and prospects will start finding you instead of you having to search them out.
