How many sales leads did your website generate last week? Last month? Last year?
How many placements did you close because of your website?
Is your site attracting candidates? Is it getting them to apply?
Your website can — and should — be your most productive employee.
Staffing websites have gone through an amazing evolution over the past 20 years. In the dot-com days of the late 90s, few staffing firms had a website. In the early 2000s, staffing companies created “brochure sites” that did little to facilitate the sales process.
Over the last five to seven years, staffing websites have greatly evolved to become 24/7 sales and recruiting engines. Today, a well-designed staffing website will:
- Attract employers and job seekers via search engine optimization.
- Convey a firm’s positioning with case studies, testimonials and online reviews.
- Demonstrate thought-leadership through blogs, video, and other educational content.
- Drive inbound traffic by integrating website content with email marketing and social media.
- Generate sales leads with landing pages and strong calls to action.
- Facilitate the service process with online ordering, job applications, and employer and employee service portals.
Is your website doing all these things?
If you answered “no” or “I don’t know,” then it’s time to take a hard look at your website. Dig into Google Analytics to see how much traffic your site is getting, and specifically how much traffic is coming from search and social media. Look at your top entry pages, exit pages, and most viewed content. And most importantly, look at your conversion pages – pages where people can take an action – to determine if people are getting to those pages and then taking the actions you want.
In analyzing the data, you’re trying to learn a few things:
- Are we getting a lot of people to our site?
- Are people staying on the site and visiting multiple pages?
- Are we getting them to those pages where they can take action?
- What conversion rate — the percent of people who reach an action page and then take an action — is the site generating?
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Boosting Sales from Your Website
While your website is never going to replace the consulting talents of your sales team or eliminate the need for recruiters, there are lots of things you can do to make your website more productive.
Here are 14 ideas to get more sales from your staffing website:
- Shorten copy so your pages are easier to read.
- Add strong calls to action throughout every page.
- Use buttons, graphics and color to draw attention to your calls to action.
- Give people a fast way to take action near the top of every web page.
- Get every job on your website and make sure each job is optimized for SEO.
- Incorporate a ChatBot to automatically engage visitors to your website.
- Add a separate page for each skill niche you serve with content optimized for search engines.
- Add a separate page for each local office with content targeting that geographic market.
- Write blog posts about the kinds of questions your clients and candidates are asking.
- Write blog posts about job fairs, trade shows, and other events in your community.
- Shorten web forms – the fewer questions you ask the more response you will get.
- Allow people to respond to web forms via voice, chat, and SMS.
- Share your blog content on Facebook and LinkedIn as often as you can.
- Get everyone on your team involved in sharing content from your site on social media.
Most employees work 9 to 5. Your website works 24/7/365. But if your website is little more than a brochure, it adds no more value than a sales rep who never picks up the phone.
However, when designed to tell your story, optimized for SEO and mobile, integrated with social media, and built to drive response, your website can outperform almost any individual contributor.
For more ideas for your staffing website, try our FREE Staffing Website Features Checklist or Download our Staffing Website eBook.
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