Melbourne Recruitment Agency — SEO
A recruitment agency was paying $22 per job board click — organic SEO now delivers 178% more candidate leads for free.
TL;DR
- Challenge:
- A Melbourne recruitment agency spending $8K/month on Seek/Indeed with zero organic candidate flow.
- Approach:
- Job category hubs, salary guides, technical SEO fixes on 200+ job listings, backlinks from industry associations.
- Result:
- +178% organic candidate leads, job board spend cut 60%, organic traffic up 236%.
Key Results at a Glance
+178%
Organic candidate leads
-60%
Job board spend
+236%
Organic traffic
Client Context
Business Type
B2B recruitment agency (IT, accounting, healthcare)
Founded
2015
Team Size
14 recruiters
Market
Melbourne CBD + Victoria
Revenue Tier
$4.2M annual revenue
Stack Before
JobAdder ATS, Seek, Indeed, LinkedIn Recruiter
The Challenge
The agency depended on Seek and Indeed for candidate flow, spending $8K/month on job board ads. Their own website ranked for nothing — not even their own brand name in some cases.
Goals & KPIs
North-Star Metric
Cut job board dependency by 50% and grow organic candidate leads to 100+/month
Supporting KPIs
Organic candidate leads
Target: 100+/month
Job board spend reduction
Target: -50%
Organic sessions
Target: 8,000+/month
Salary guide downloads
Target: 200+/month
Cost per candidate
Target: Under $25
Discovery & Research
Audit Findings
- •200+ job pages had duplicate content issues
- •Zero schema markup for job postings
- •Missing canonicals causing indexation waste
- •No content hub, blog was dormant
- •Weak internal linking between categories
Baseline Issues
- •45 organic candidate leads/month
- •$8K/month job board spend
- •2,800 organic sessions/month
- •Zero salary guide downloads
Competitor Insight
Top-ranking recruiters had job schema markup, salary guides for every specialty, and 40+ backlinks from industry bodies. Their organic accounted for 60% of candidate flow.
Audience Insight
Melbourne candidates search "salary guide + role" and "how much does X pay in Melbourne" 3x more than direct job title searches — informational intent precedes application intent.
Strategy
Core Hypothesis
“If we build category hubs plus salary guide content, then organic candidate leads will 2.5x because candidates research pay first, then apply.”
Positioning Shift
Repositioned from "recruitment agency" to "Melbourne's specialist salary + career authority" — content-first, jobs-second.
Channel Mix
Category hub SEO · 45%
High-intent job seekers
Salary guides & career content · 35%
Top-funnel discovery
Technical fixes · 10%
Indexation cleanup
Authority link building · 10%
Domain trust
Our Approach
Job category hub pages
Created SEO-optimised category pages for each specialty — IT recruitment Melbourne, accounting jobs Melbourne, healthcare staffing — with schema markup for job postings.
Content hub
Published salary guides, interview prep guides, and market insights targeting long-tail keywords that candidates and employers both search for.
Technical & link building
Fixed crawl errors on 200+ job listing pages, built backlinks from industry associations, and implemented proper canonical tags for duplicate listings.
Phased Roadmap
Weeks 1–4
Technical Cleanup
- →Job posting schema across 200+ pages
- →Canonical tag fixes
- →Duplicate content resolution
- →Sitemap rebuild
Weeks 5–12
Content Hubs
- →Built 3 category hubs (IT, accounting, healthcare)
- →Published 12 salary guides
- →Created interview prep content
- →Cross-linked to job listings
Weeks 13–20
Authority Build
- →Guest posts on 5 industry publications
- →AHRI + CPA Australia partnerships
- →Speaking at 2 recruitment conferences
- →Backlink profile grew 3x
Weeks 21–32
Scale
- →Expanded to construction + engineering categories
- →Launched weekly salary newsletter
- →Retargeting to salary guide readers
- →Cut Seek budget by 60%
What We Built
The Results
Monthly Organic Candidate Leads
Before vs After — 8 Months
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic candidate leads | 45/month | 125/month | +178% |
| Job board spend | $8,000/month | $3,200/month | -60% |
| Organic traffic | 2,800/month | 9,400/month | +236% |
“We have cut our Seek budget in half and the candidate quality from organic is actually better.”
Karen S.
Director, Recruitment Agency
Key Insights
- →Salary guides drove 40% of leads — informational content converts recruitment audiences better than job listings
- →Schema markup produced job posting rich snippets — 34% CTR uplift on category pages
- →Industry association backlinks moved rankings faster than blog outreach
- →Cutting Seek spend was scary but the trickle became a flood after month 4
What's Next
Expanding into legal + finance categories, launching a candidate personality assessment tool, and testing programmatic SEO for suburb-specific job pages.
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Services Used
Representative case study. Figures illustrate the type of outcomes achievable through these strategies for Australian businesses; individual results vary based on market, budget and starting position.