Is your website helping you to win new clients, as well as attract candidates? Is it fostering new relationships and attracting talent to work for your staffing business? Is it driving maximum revenue, or failing you as a business?
Here’s five reasons you may not be getting the best ROI from your website and how to fix it.
1. Poor back-end usability. A web platform that is challenging to navigate and populate with content will lead to poor adoption by your marketing team.
How to fix it:
- Review your website platform to evaluate whether it caters for your needs today and is able to scale with your growth. How easy is it to make regular updates, add new pages, make edits to content, images, news and blogs, testimonials and to apply SEO?
- Evolve your digital presence to reflect market change. This is critical in every business environment, but especially now given a shifting balance of power between candidates and clients.
- Speak to your website provider to ensure that you’re fully optimizing the tools at your disposal. If the platform is not fit for purpose, it may be time to invest in an upgraded platform that will yield better results.
2. Poor visibility of results. A lack of meaningful performance reports means you won’t know what’s driving results. If you don’t know how it’s working, you can’t measure it or influence the effectiveness your marketing channels.
How to fix it:
- At a very basic level connect your website to Google Analytics and WebMaster tools. This will give you insights about traffic and trends and what is happening in real time, or over a period of weeks and months for comparisons.
- Introduce and integrate last (or first) click attribution modelling software to discover where visitors are coming from and most importantly which are converting to applications and therefore impacting your bottom line.
- Tracking will allow you focus on what is generating results so you can divert spend and resource to the most effective channels. For example, advertising with certain job boards may drive lots of web visitors (quantity), but not result in job applications (quality). If your website is further integrated with your CRM you should have visibility of the entire candidate journey, allowing you to measure clicks to placements (revenue).
3. Poor candidate experience. A poor digital candidate experience will lead to high bounce rates. If jobseekers can’t easily find what they are looking for and search and apply for roles, they are likely to continue their search elsewhere. Attractive imagery and brand visuals on your site may draw people in, together with optimized content, but the ease of job application is arguably the most critical part of the journey to maximise applications.
How to fix it:
- Improve your search and application process. How easy can you make the path? How can you remove noise and distraction from the application process?
- Implement a funnel mode conversion approach, with logical steps to move them from browsing to application.
- Utilize tag management to automatically populate pages with relevant content. For example, if you are creating pages for a specific sector or location use tags to deliver associated blogs, testimonials and jobs so visitors don’t have to leave the page and go looking elsewhere. Pulling relevant content together acts as a magnet helping you convert passive jobseekers.
- Build job alert subscribers by promoting this on pages through wisely deployed pop-ups, via candidate newsletters, e-signatures and consultant communications.
- Personalized candidate portals will offer a richer experience that reduces friction in the application process.
- Mobile-optimization is essential given the increasing statistics for mobile job search.
- Adopt clear and concise navigation with adaptive technology that understands and changes behavior and scales navigation according to the device viewed on.
- Make it even easier to apply by allowing candidates to populate their application directly from their LinkedIn profile, rather than having to submit a resume or CV.
4. Lack of clear goals. A poor understanding of your website’s goals make it is impossible to evaluate how well your site is performing. Without a defined strategy it is hard to know what you should improve upon going forwards.
How to fix it:
- Have clear sight of what are you benchmarking against. Don’t discard the analytics of your old website. You want to be able to monitor the uplifts and speak to your website provider to see how to generate better results.
- Don’t trust a “build it and they will come” approach. Have a clear strategy for generating traffic and ultimately conversions supported by robust SEO.
5. One dimensional. A website that is focussed on candidate attraction only, without considering attraction of clients and internal talent, is not serving you as comprehensively as it could.
- Review your site navigation – does it cater for all your audiences? Have a clear strategy for your website to address the 3 Cs – candidates, clients, consultants – with content geared to all areas, weighted according to your priorities.
- If your priority has switched with the current climate to winning new business, ensure that you are using all the levers available to showcase your expertise to potential new clients via your website
- Dedicated client branded microsites can be used as part of a pitch process to win new business, as well as to help you attract candidates for a specific campaign.
- Your “work for us pages” should be vibrant and visualize your employer brand.
Finally, your website should never be considered “done.” It should absolutely be a living breathing part of your marketing strategy. Make sure it’s not failing you.