Marketing for Recruitment Agencies

What marketing works for recruitment agencies?

The marketing that works for recruitment agencies treats employers and candidates as separate audiences with separate pages. Employer marketing wins briefs through specialist reputation, niche pages and referrals. Candidate marketing fills roles through job boards, your own job pages and a database you keep warm.

Most agency websites blur the two. A homepage that says “connecting talent with opportunity” speaks to nobody. A hiring manager wants to know whether you understand their sector and how fast you can shortlist. A candidate wants to see live roles and know whether you place people like them.

Audience	What they search	What converts them	Channels that work
Employers (clients)	“[specialism] recruitment agency [city]”, “labour hire [trade] [city]”	Proof you know the sector, salary data, speed to shortlist	Niche pages, referrals, LinkedIn, Google Ads
Candidates	“[role] jobs [city]”, “jobs near me”, “seek”	Live, relevant roles and a quick apply	Seek, LinkedIn, Indeed, your job pages, your database

Google Ads search volume data for Australia (via DataForSEO, October 2025 to September 2026) shows “recruitment agency” and “recruitment agency near me” at about 6,600 and 8,100 searches a month, against 40,500 for “jobs near me” and 1.83 million for “seek”. Candidate demand is huge but concentrated on job boards. Employer-side searches are smaller and more valuable, because each one can mean a placement fee.

How do you win more employer clients?

Win employers by being the obvious specialist for their sector and city. Build a page for each specialism you recruit in, such as mining and resources in Perth, construction in Brisbane or accounting and finance in Melbourne, and fill it with what a hiring manager needs before they call.

A strong employer niche page includes:

• The roles you fill, with typical seniority levels and contract types (permanent, contract, temp).
• Salary or rate ranges for those roles, updated at least yearly. A downloadable salary guide is one of the few recruitment assets that earns links and repeat visits.
• How you work: time to shortlist, how you screen, replacement guarantees if you offer them.
• Who does the work: the consultants on that desk, with their background in the sector.
• A brief-us form that asks for the role, location and timing, so the enquiry is useful when it arrives.

Referrals and repeat clients still bring most employer work for most agencies. The website’s job is to make those referrals convert, and to win the employers who search before they ask around. If you have offices in more than one city, give each office its own Business Profile and location page; see our local SEO service for how Maps works.

How do you attract candidates without depending on Seek?

You can’t drop Seek, but you can stop relying on it for every placement. Keep advertising there, and build three things you own alongside it: job pages that rank in Google, candidate landing pages for the roles you place most often, and a database and email list you contact regularly.

Seek dominates Australian candidate search, and LinkedIn and Indeed matter for some roles. The problem with depending on them is cost per ad and the fact that every candidate who applies through them also sees your competitors’ ads. Candidates who find you directly, or who are already in your database, are cheaper to place.

Channel	Who owns the audience	Cost model	Best use
Seek	Seek	Pay per job ad, plus upgrades	Most roles; the default for active candidates
LinkedIn	LinkedIn	Job slots, Recruiter licences, ads	Professional and senior roles, passive candidates
Indeed	Indeed	Free and sponsored listings	Volume and entry-level roles
Your job pages	You	SEO and site costs	Roles you place repeatedly, brand searches
Your candidate database and email	You	CRM and your time	Re-placing contractors, matching new roles fast

Practical steps: send every job board applicant to a candidate profile in your CRM, email your database when relevant roles open, and build candidate pages for evergreen searches like “FIFO jobs Perth” or “aged care jobs Adelaide” that list your current roles and explain how you place people.

Do job posting SEO and Google for Jobs work in Australia?

Job page SEO works; Google for Jobs, as a separate jobs panel, doesn’t currently show in Australia. Google’s job posting documentation (last updated 8 September 2026) lists the regions where the job search experience is available, and Australia isn’t among them. Your job pages can still rank in normal results for searches like “[role] jobs [suburb]”.

Get the structure right anyway. It costs little, it’s what Google asks for, and it helps Google understand and index your job pages:

• One job per page. Google says JobPosting markup must only be used on pages with a single job posting, not on listing pages.
• Required properties. datePosted, description, hiringOrganization, jobLocation and title. For fully remote roles, Google wants applicantLocationRequirements and jobLocationType set to TELECOMMUTE.
• Confidential clients. If you’re hiring for an employer who wants to stay anonymous, Google says to use “confidential” as the hiringOrganization name.
• Expired jobs. Google doesn’t allow expired job postings in its jobs experience and says failing to handle them may lead to a manual action. Set validThrough, return a 404 or 410, or remove the markup when a role closes.
• No fees and no login. Google doesn’t allow postings that require applicants to pay, and job descriptions shouldn’t sit behind a login.
• Crawling. Google recommends its Indexing API over sitemaps for job posting URLs, because it prompts a faster crawl.

Most recruitment CRMs, such as JobAdder and Bullhorn, publish jobs to your website through a plugin or feed. Check that the output follows the rules above, because many job feeds put every role on one listing page with no individual URLs.

What rules apply to recruitment and labour hire advertising?

If you supply workers to host businesses (labour hire, temp or contract), licensing rules apply in several states, including rules about advertising. Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and the ACT run labour hire licensing schemes, while the NSW Government says there is currently no licensing scheme in NSW.

Victoria shows the risk. The Labour Hire Authority says it’s unlawful for unlicensed individuals or organisations to advertise labour hire services in Victoria or hold themselves out as a labour hire provider. In July 2025 it announced penalties totalling $91,000 against a Queensland company and its director for advertising labour hire services in Victoria without a licence, through Facebook and the company’s website.

Do	Don’t
Check licensing in every state you supply workers to, not just your head office state	Advertise temp or contract placements in a state where you’re not licensed
Use “confidential” in job markup when the client is anonymous	Invent a hiring organisation name or post fake roles to build your database
Remove or expire closed roles promptly	Leave filled roles live to collect applications
Make salary and contract type claims you can back up	Charge candidates a fee to apply or be represented

This is a plain-English summary, not legal advice. Check each state’s labour hire regulator for current requirements.

Does LinkedIn content work for recruitment agencies?

Yes, and it works best through consultants’ own profiles. Hiring managers and passive candidates follow people who know their market, so a consultant who posts useful, regular updates on salaries, skill shortages and hiring trends in their niche stays front of mind when a role opens.

What tends to work: a monthly market update for the desk’s specialism, a short note on what candidates are asking for, salary movements, and the occasional “how we filled a hard role” story with client permission. What doesn’t: reposted job ads with no commentary and generic motivational posts.

We don’t manage LinkedIn accounts. We’ll make sure every specialism has a page worth linking to from those posts, so LinkedIn attention lands somewhere that converts into a brief or an application.

How much does marketing for a recruitment agency cost?

Typical Australian market ranges for recruitment agency SEO are $1,500–$3,000 per month for a single office competing in a busy specialism or city, and $3,000–$6,000+ per month for multi-office or national agencies with many niches. Google Ads management is usually $500–$1,500 per month with ad spend separate. These are market ranges, not our quote.

Item	Typical Australian market range
SEO, single office, one or two specialisms	$1,500–$3,000 per month
SEO, multi-office or national, many specialisms	$3,000–$6,000+ per month
Google Ads management (ad spend separate)	$500–$1,500 per month, or 10–20% of spend
Small-business website, template	$1,000–$3,000 one-off
Custom website with CRM job feed integration	$3,000–$15,000 one-off
One-off paid audit	$500–$2,500

Worked maths for a hypothetical agency in Newcastle: if an average permanent placement earns a $15,000 fee, one extra employer brief a quarter that turns into a placement covers a mid-range retainer for the year. Contract and temp desks earn less per placement but recur. For campaign setup, see our Google Ads service, and compare scopes on our SEO pricing page. Work is month-to-month, with no lock-in.

Want to see where your agency ranks for its specialisms, and whether your job pages are set up properly? Get a free recruitment marketing audit.