Case Study - Hays - SEO

Objectives

The highly competitive nature of the recruitment sector is a challenge for any job site, so having recognised the need to improve their online presence, Hays.com approached bigmouthmedia in late 2007 with a view to securing an online advantage over competitors including Monster and TotalJobs.

With the credit crunch just starting to make its presence felt, it was imperative that Hays.com had as much online visibility as possible in order to secure its place at the forefront of the UK recruitment market.

The main campaign Objectives were:

• Improve search engine rankings
• Improve traffic figures
• Increase online brand awareness
• Increase online job applications

Our Solution

Bigmouthmedia immediately recognised that the technical limitations of the Hays.com site meant that increasing traffic to the site was not going to be a straightforward project, and that a huge amount of keyword research would be required alongside impact analysis aimed at highlighting the best opportunities to drive increased traffic and job applications.

As Hay.com is split into thirty-three separate divisions, the required keyword research was a huge undertaking. In order to move forwards with the project it was necessary to get buy-in from each manager in each division, in itself a mammoth task.

The project encompassed:

• Keyword research across hundreds of job categories, and many thousands of keywords
• Identification of high impact keyword terms
• Keyword-focused press releases aimed at targeting specific high volume keywords by building keyword rich links
• Roll out of content rich, keyword focused second tier content pages
• Copywriting training delivered to Hays in-house team to be disseminated across the thirty-three separate divisions
• Review of content created by Hays

Due to the wide ranging nature of the campaign, tracking and reporting on the impact of the keyword implementation, press release dissemination and link building efforts was a huge undertaking.

Bigmouthmedia designed a bespoke reporting method for Hays.com which enabled all of the required data to be captured for, and segmented by, each division, and which allowed the huge amount of captured data to be easily digestible.