I’m a Hustler Baby

It’s all about the Mckinley’s, (that’s the $500 bill), albeit discontinued in 1969 it’s still legal tender and worth 5 X that of your Benji. It’s old school yes, but legal and at the least pretty damn awesome to have one of those sitting in your pocket. It’s the Google of search, the Bing of photos and the cheese to a Philly Cheesesteak. Too much?

At heart, recruiters are hustlers. We are networking Gods with egos bigger than most peoples tax returns. We are a breed of old school with a new school flare that loves to hold a phone, push buttons and dial our way to profitability. In other words, sitting back with our feet up, waiting for leads to filter in through our amazing website isn’t much of an option. FOMAC sets in (Fear of missing a conversation), and for good reason, it’s our livelihood.

Passive Marketing Strategies Are Scary

Let us call it what it is. It’s scary to try new things. Failure is not for everyone. This isn’t a Gary Vaynerchuck or ET video where failure is the next success. I get it, failure breeds success but for the 98% of us that live the dream working for the corporate beast we don’t get the luxury to fail gloriously and call it a win.

Because FOMAC has ruled the world and everything in it (sing it), the skys the limit. You can push it in recruitment when it comes to implementing new strategies into your staffing business, large and small because, well, most organizations haven’t even begun the conversation.

The Process of Getting Traffic

SEO is not just 3 letters strung together to form a cool acronym. It has real value to your online footprint, to be honest, it’s what your missing to drive what can be an amazing amount targeted eyeballs to your content. SEO is not simple to master but if you can learn enough to be dangerous, as a recruiter, your pocketbook can recognize a significant bump over your earnings from last year.

There are thousands, literally, of ways that you can combine a number of efforts to increase your SEO value within your network of sites and there are many great articles available to that outline that process or contract types that you can bring into your organization. But for those that are resistant to considering the value and to those that say my audience is unique, here are a few key stats to consider.

Executive Search Firm: IT Sector

Suppose you are an executive search firm specializing in the IT sector. Popular belief is that most firms within this subset are nearly non-existent online. You, as well as I know that this is not the case. Most Grandparents, if not Great Grandparent are online at this point. But let’s not take innuendo as the new non-fake news.

Here are the 2 tools that we’ll look at:

1. Google Adwords
2. Keyword planner tool

We start our investigation by creating a Google AdWords account and loading the Keyword Planner tool (under the Tools menu option).

We enter “executive search IT” into the first section of the tool labeled “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”. Google gives us a huge list of potential search terms we might want to target, some of which are relevant to our business.

After paring down the list, we end up with the following keywords:

• executive IT recruiters
• headhunter IT
• headhunter IT management
• recruitment IT
• IT executive job search
• IT executive jobs
• IT executive recruiters
• IT executive search
• IT executive search firms
• IT headhunters
• IT job recruiters
• IT management headhunters
• IT management recruiters
• IT management recruitment agencies
• IT recruiting firms
• IT recruitment
• IT recruitment agencies
• IT search firms

We take those terms and enter them into the second section of the Keyword Planner tool labeled “Get search volume using data and trends” and we immediately discover that there are around 15,750 searches per month for these keywords. That’s a pretty good volume for all of which we are not being found by people in our local area searching for content, service providers or jobs.

We also get a more granular look at which keywords provide the greatest opportunities so we know what to target.

4% Is Our Goal

And just like that, powered by the magic of blogging our content and SEO plan is fully baked and out of the SEO oven. Here are some great articles on how to do this in real time (it’s far from magic and close to hard)

Now that we’ve invested many hours in planning, content and execution we’ve made it to the front page of Google ranking on average in 6th position for most of the list above. According to Moz, when you rank in the sixth position for a Google search, you can expect to receive about 4% of the clicks for a given term.

Using simple arithmetic and the numbers  above if this holds true we are going to see some sick traffic from our efforts.

15,750 searches

We can expect 630 site visitors per month from Google traffic (SEO not paid)

If we can work at industry average on conversion we should see a .5% conversion rate on traffic to clients

This will equal 3 new monthly clients for a turn rate of about 36 new clients per year.

Nuff’ said.

Zack Gallinger is the founder of a recruitment website design and marketing company, Talent Hero Media, that focuses exclusively on the recruiting and staffing industry. The company helps recruiters find new clients and place more candidates by building world-class websites that are optimized for search.

Connect with Zack on Twitter.

By Zack Gallinger