In our Recruitment Agency's Guide to Digital Marketing e-book, we mentioned that keywords are no longer used to determine a recruitment firm's standing, meaning its useless to overcrowd your content with popular keywords and phrases - such as “find a job" and “looking for a career" - to ensure you rank highly in Google.

Instead, you need to approach keywords with a certain finesse and make them part of an overall SEO package that appeals to a human audience rather than an artificial one. If you haven't yet read about how SEO has recently changed in our ebook, download your copy today.

A recruiter's SEO campaign should make use of keywords to convert clients and candidates by providing content that contributes to an overall quality user experience, as well as gains good visibility on search engines. But what should you be looking out for when researching keywords?

In this blog post, we'll reveal the key secrets that will help you unlock the potential of keywords.

1. You Might Already Have What You're Looking For

Before you completely scrap your current SEO approach and jeopardise the traffic you're already getting to your recruitment firms site, take a look at Google Analytics. To do so, you must ensure you have a Google Webmaster Tools account linked to Analytics, as you won't be able to see the results otherwise - don't fret if you can't see anything straight away because in some cases it takes a couple of days to gather data.

Once the accounts are linked, check in Acquisition > Search Engine Optimisation > Queries to see the keywords people have typed in where Google has shown a page from your site in its results. You can see how popular a keyword is by looking at the ‘Clicks', which is the number of click throughs to your website URLs from a Google Search results page (not including paid campaigns).

These words and phrases are working for your business, so make sure you include them in a keyword map, clearly addressing which words and phrases will be used on each page, so that you don't have multiple pages competing for the same keyword themes.

2. Ask Yourself How Relevant the Keyword Is

A great way to find keywords that work is by using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner. Typing in a term such as “recruitment" will give you a whole list of suggestions similar to your keyword. For example, “recruitment consultant" offers up “recruitment consultants" and “recruitment consultancy", which are both relevant if “recruitment" is entered in the search bar.

Finding relevant and related keywords is also useful for satisfying the increasing intelligence of search engines. If you talk about jobs, bots will expect to see related terms, including job titles, application jargon and information on interviews, as well as words of a similar meaning, such as career, employment and vacancy. The more you use these words naturally within your content, the easier it will be for search engines to determine your relevance and authority, meaning youll have better visibility.

Other ways to ensure you use keywords correctly and are maximising their potential is by:

• Using phrases of three to five words, such as “full-time nursing job vacancies", as this is more likely to attract candidates who know what they are looking for, therefore they will get in touch if you provide them with the right information
• Adding a location to your keywords by adding a country (“jobs in the UK"), region (“jobs in the North West"), or city (“jobs in Manchester"), which will attract prospects from that area to use your services and means you may appear higher in local search results

3. Keep it natural

The rules surrounding how many times you should mention a keyword have been debated for many years. The simple answer is to use them as naturally as you would in speech. After all, you wouldn't repeat a certain word in every single line when you're speaking to someone. See if you can spot the keywords in this example:

• Are you looking for a new career? Well, we have the perfect new career for you. If you're looking for a new career in education, we have the career for you. If you're looking for a new career in telemarketing, we have the career for you. Whatever new career you're looking for, we're guaranteed to have the career for it. So what are you waiting for, get in touch with our new career experts who will get you started on your new career.

We're sure you've picked up on “career" and “new career" as being the keywords in this extract, and we're also sure you'll agree this piece of content sounds completely absurd. Yes, we may have gone a little over the top, but we have a really important point to prove - don't stuff your content or you'll pay for it!

Search engine robots that crawl your site will be able to see irregular use of keywords and are not afraid to dole out severe punishments that could include completely removing your website from their indexes. What's more, your audience won't be captivated and will probably just leave the page.

Using keywords in the right way can have a huge payoff for your recruitment agency, helping you to garner business from the kind of clients and candidates that you're looking for. At first it might seem a bit of a minefield, but it's worth the effort because Google penalties can take years to recover from, if at all.

To read more about SEO, take a look at our Recruitment Agency's Guide to Digital Marketing.

If you have any questions about keywords or any other aspects of marketing, our experts are more than happy to answer them. Contact I-COM today on 0161 402 3170 or fill in our contact form and we'll be in touch.